Are you preparing to buy an electric car yet?

@HootyTheNightOwl I agree, it seems unfeasible to get every house a charge point especially in terraced streets and there are millions of them here.
It'll be interesting to see if we can pull it off or will something better come along.

@Scarfface It is unfeasible, if not downright impossible.

I live in just such a street; built when petrol vehicles were in their infancy but you were allowed to drive your battery-powered car through London's Royal Parks!

Where is my car at the moment, from when I arrived home yesterday evening ?

In a nearby street wide enough for parking on both sides, and though one side is terraced the other has large front and side gardens giving domestic parking with sufficient random spaces between gates for some extra on-street parking.

Such roads are being built again.

In recent years developers inspired by the so-called "Poundbury" pseudo-village housing estate near Dorchester, have returned to the 19C idea of terraced homes with front doors opening straight onto the pavements. No front garden at all, not even a narrow separating yard.

Goodness where you park your car in such places, though Poundbury appears to have communal parking bays scattered around it. I think the idea was in indeed to discourage car ownership on a short-sighted, ultimately failed dream that everyone would have all their needs including employment within walking or cycling distance of home.

No stopping councils pushing shopping out to shopping-centres designed expressly for car-only use; no idea of the locations of schools and hospitals; or that many people have family, social and leisure lives distant from home and not readily accessible by train or bus.

@ArishMell All so true.
It's a crazy situation. Nobody thinks longer term I guess, just expanding and more for the economy.
Worrying thing is we need to get rid of fossil fuel burning and quickly.

@Scarfface I think that lack of long-term thinking is the nub of the problem.

@ArishMell typical human behaviour, we can do it so we will 🤣
Let's let people burn fuel, it'll make us money.

@Scarfface I agree with your first point but the "we can" is often not supported by reality.

The second though, no. There is a huge push to avoid burning fuel and even the oil companies are investing in so-called "renewable energy"; but the whole situation has become chaotic by the concept of "we can so will" being warped into "we will but never mind if we can".

This has been around for the last 100 years, although more about depletion of natural resources than the effects of using them, so it's not as if we've suddenly plunged into the problem.

And now I fear we are being led or at least influenced increasingly by a "Just Press [Enter]" generation of "Now-We-Alls" with poor technical literacy but supreme faith in instant results.

(Being able to use a computer does not make you understand science and engineering, the two disciplines we so desperately need.)

@ArishMell I meant the we can so we will as in some people decided to sell vehicles by the millions to everyone. It was good for a while.
I think it applies to a lot of things we have in our way of life. Nobody thought we would be destroying our plannet and now we have a few problems.
I'm drifting away from the conversation about electric cars now 🤣

@Scarfface I don't know if it's true, but I was told that you can't just buy an electric car - you NEED to buy the home charging station, too.

So if you buy said charging station and can't get planning permission for it because you live in a flat or terraced house that has no outdoor space to the front of your property - what then???

You could run a cable from inside and obstruct the footpath (which you'll eventually get done for) or they'll refuse the sale because you have no place to charge the car at home.

You could buy a second hand electric vehicle and hop from charging point to charging point every couple of hours - but we already have people getting parking tickets for using these charging points at major supermarkets without purchasing anything from said company.

The way I see it, without significant investment and changes to the law by the government, there's no way that 100% electric cars can and will work - as much as I support the dream of them... how can this dream become a reality???

@HootyTheNightOwl I don't think it is a possibile to get chargers everywhere, there are so many problems with the idea. I've seen things about using lamp posts as charging posts and the likes but even then it wouldn't cater for everyone.
Hopefully it'll all sort out in the future.

@Scarfface My carpark alone has space for 7 or 8 cars and access to 2 lamp posts - even if they rig up this system, at least 4 people will be trailing cables across the footpath to charge... then there's keeping the 4 or 5 cars who park on the roadside off them.

It could work - but not in that timeframe. We need to take a few ideas from the Dutch and invest in underground parking... only we can't do that because of all the mines dotted all over the place that were simply covered over rather than being filled in properly.

There are two around me that have opened up in recent years.

@HootyTheNightOwl I doubt we could manage to build underground carparks just because the UK are notoriously bad at big projects due to the government stealing the money all the time 🤣

I agree with you entirely, it's a bit of a nightmare for lots of people and places.
My town is full of streets of terrace houses, I can't see anything working here except some people won't have cars.

@HootyTheNightOwl Bad idea underground parking, once fire is started its hard for firemen to stop it and get the vehicle out of garage.....last week an EV on a ferry got on fire, rumor has it to ban EV on board on ferry's.

@Scarfface No cars, no buses... and no cycling infrastructure in a lot of places.

People around me are already losing their jobs because the bus to work isn't turning up on time. "Get the earlier bus", some say - that's a good idea if the "earlier bus" wasn't an hour or two before you need to be at work.

It's no fun sitting outside a locked building for an hour or two on cold and wet days because that's the only bus you could be certain of getting to arrive on time.

@HootyTheNightOwl there ain't many good options for getting around in my town, but the busses are ok.
If I had no car I'd have to swap careers I reckon 😬

@IloveJ We have to do something, though. Long term poor street design means that many people have zero access to charging points and trailing cables across footpaths is illegal for obstruction reasons (you can't even leave your bin out after its been emptied for obstruction reasons).

We don't have the land available for multi storey carparks when they're trying to slap houses on greenbelt land as it is, so underground parking is the only other option - if you can avoid all the old pits and landfills.

Obviously, that's not going to work here, considering that I live on an old landfill.

@HootyTheNightOwl maybe residential rota's would work. If charging was fast enough we could all swap the cables round. Maybe shuffling start finish times and maybe days for working.

@Scarfface The only bus company in my area is publishing daily lists of cancelled routes since Brexit - and most of those hit during the hours that you're trying to get to work or school.

I live between two cities and a good number of people who live here work in one of those cities. The closest one is 10 miles away and I'm drawing a blank when it comes to finding people who would want to walk or cycle 10 miles to work every morning.

@HootyTheNightOwl It's not good for none car owners then 🙁 hopefully it's just a blib during this UK economic downturn. Things need to get better and public transport is an important part of the global climate problem. Electrifying and improving that could help people ditch cars.

@Scarfface Electrifying and improving that only works if you have enough men and women to drive them, though... we have a chronic shortage of bus drivers and only one company with a monopoly in this area.

Even the perk of free bus travel for them and their family isn't enough to coax more people to go for their PSV and work for this company.

@HootyTheNightOwl I actually looked at a bus driver job, the reviews are shocking 😬

@HootyTheNightOwl There are shortages of train drivers too, in parts of the UK.

Why, I don't know. It's not as if the pay is low although there is a lot of unsociable hours work, and it carries very high responsibilities.

A lot of nerve too: as one driver I know told me, you still have to know where you are and keep to time even when driving a passenger-train at 100mph on very dark, foggy nights when you can barely see the rails only yards in front of you. They do have signal-indicators etc. in the cab, but as aids and safety-devices, not replacements for route knowledge.

One difficulty is that you can't just recruit a driver from one design of train on one route, for example London (Paddington) - Bristol, and expect him or her simply to take over another design on the London (Waterloo) - Weymouth, or London (Kings Cross) - Edinburgh, routes.