Cars, cars, everywhere...

I’ve just about finished riding my bike down every street in Worcester (I know, pretty cool right...check out Wandrer if you fancy a bit of this action), and while I’ve been navigating my way around the roads it’s difficult not to notice that we have a problem. I might as well just blurt it out. Cars. Not cars being driven, I’m talking about the cars sat doing nothing. They’re everywhere.Full disclosure; I own and use a car. I’m not anti car; they’re incredible machines, and have transformed personal transport, enabling journeys of hundreds of miles, reliably and with exceptional convenience.So why do I think they’re a problem? Well, we don’t seem to have enough space to keep the number of cars we have. Or rather, despite the vast amount of space we’ve allocated to cars, whether that’s for moving cars or parking cars, both at home and at our destinations, it’s completely inadequate. We’ve paved our gardens, levelled buildings, and created multi-storey facilities for them, but it's still not enough. And so we have to park them where they shouldn’t be parked, like on pavements. Or adjacent to junctions, or where there are parking restrictions.It goes without saying that a single occupancy car journey is less energy efficient than other means, such as walking, cycling, or public transport, but perhaps worse for the city is what an inefficient use of space they are. According to the RAC Foundation the average car in the UK is only used for 4% of the time, so for the other 23 hours per day it’s essentially abandoned.What we collectively do about this problem is a toughie. Trends around public transport locally seem to be a relative increase in prices coupled with worsening services. Walking and cycling seems an obvious choice for short journeys, but safe, segregated infrastructure for cycling is severely lacking, and it’s understandable that many people construct well rehearsed barriers as to why it’s impossible to undertake many journeys by bike, and so reach for the car keys out of habit, particularly when they have invested substantial sums of money in a metal box with 4 wheels. But somehow around 20% of Worcester households manage without one (this over 60% in some areas of the city centre).So why not accept we love the car? Left unchecked we can only expect the growth in car ownership, and miles driven, to continue to increase. This at a time when we must decarbonise all aspects of our lives; the government strategy on decarbonising transport has a target of 50% of urban journeys to be by walking and cycling by 2030. We should ask our politicians for plans as to how this will be achieved, but incentivising a reduction in car ownership might be a start.With more cars, comes a requirement for more space to store them for the 23 hours per day they’re sat doing nothing. The thought of readily storing large objects that aren’t cars liberally around the city would be ridiculed, or considered illegal. Why are we so accepting of cars taking up so much space?