[XAP]Bob wrote:fullupandslowingdown wrote:
It's said that many families share a car, but in my experience more multi driver families have a car each as it's difficult for them both to use the same car for work and school runs etc etc. Then there's the mainly men that have more tha one car to themselves, nextdoor neighbour has a banger of a merc, and a Porsche for the weekends (pompous git)
Yep - although we have been one car, two drivers for well over a decade. I can remember hiring a car once, and borrowing a friends car once, to enable combinations of journeys.
I don’t know of any (I probably do, but can’t think of them) other households with fewer cars than drivers, excluding those with no cars.
When we lived in the UK, on our cul-de-sac, there were several families, including ours that had one car. However, about 25% of the families (60 ish households?) had more motor vehicles than drivers. Our immediate neighbours, for example, had 4 cars and 3 drivers. There was a business vehicle, a family van, and two smaller cars. The couple that lived there with their kids (the oldest of which was the 3rd driver) were a builder and a child minder, so the business vehicle and family van were 'justified' for their work. Of the other cars, one was the older son's, and the other other was used when just one or two people went somewhere & they didn't need one of the larger vehicles. Of course they only had parking (front garden) for two vehicles. On our end of the cul-de-sac, (16ish households) the street was parked up with motor vehicles, and they were all owned by 4 houses. Every single vehicle. The rest of us parked on our drives.
This was a large village with mostly working class homes, and our street was all mid 60s semi-detached 3 bedrooms (a couple of them were extended).
By contrast (and I have posted about this before) where I live in Norway, out of the 16 or 17 households on our little square, there are 2 without cars and the rest have one car each. For several of us, the car spends most of its time sitting in front of the house because people commute by other means (walking, cycling, public transport). I expect that the rate at which people have access to a car is higher than the UK average. One of the carless households has access (with planning) to a business vehicle, and one of our neighbours has his car in a car share scheme, so any of us can hire it from him using a car share app.
“In some ways, it is easier to be a dissident, for then one is without responsibility.”
― Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom