Ray Massey's column

Ray laments the impracticalities of 'integrated transport'.

Auto Express Car Reviews

29th October 2007

Does the motor car have a future? I was musing on this as I prepared to make a trip to the dentist. And there’s nothing like a visit to the tooth extractor to concentrate the mind. Because you know it’s going to hurt – either in the mouth or in the wallet.


	I was suffering not from an Inconvenient Truth but an Inconvenient Tooth. Going to the dentist on public transport was impossible

My dilemma was this. Do I drive the five miles or so from the Surrey Fringe to the dental surgery in Wimbledon. Or should I use public transport and a bit of shank’s pony? Clearly the green propaganda has got to me. Not so long ago, it wouldn’t even have crossed my mind – I’d have driven. But now I’m measuring my carbon footprint and thinking of the planet. There was a good and practical argument – the environment aside – for using public transport. I thought it might save me time and gridlock.

It was a straightforward couple of station stops down the line, and it would give me a bit of exercise with a hike up Wimbledon Hill to the village. The only complication was that I had a ‘must do’ errand on the way which involved a short drive with the car.

Not a problem, I thought. I’ll dump the motor near Surbiton station – a little closer in – take the train from there, and pick it up on the way back. Easy. Oh, if only it were.

Remember former Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott’s famous boasts – a decade ago when this Government first came to power – about ‘integrated transport’? There’s a phrase you don’t hear much now, after 10 years of broken promises. So I set off for the station in the new MINI Clubman, with its ‘green’ stop-start’ technology, which switches off the engine when you come to a halt for a short period.

I did my little errand and, passing what seemed like a traffic warden on every corner, drove to the station car park at Surbiton.I approached the parking payment machine – but there were no prices. A helpful chap said it was £8 a day, but that the machine didn’t work properly and you had to put your credit card in twice. I shouldn’t worry, as no one ever checks.

Looking at the dire clamping signs on every post, I decided not to risk it, and headed off to another car park. Minimum stay? One-and-a-half hours. Not enough. Burning up more fuel, I tried a third car park, next to a supermarket. Minimum stay – two hours. But would I be back in time?

Probably not. By now, I was cutting it fine to get to my appointment at all. I felt thwarted at every turn. So what did I do? I drove to Wimbledon. And blow me, even the car park opposite the station there was closed. So I then drove right up to the dental practice and used one of the parking bays in a side road. Madness. I’d have preferred to train it. But the ‘system’ conspired against me.

Former US vice president Al Gore has just won the Nobel Peace Prize for his movie An Inconvenient Truth, which the swampies want to show in every school, but which a High Court judge says contains significant untruths. Well, it’s all very well trying to do the right thing and leave your car at home. But when it’s the anti-car brigade, through their punitive parking regimes, that are preventing you from saving the planet, there’s clearly something wrong.

Obviously, what I was suffering from wasn’t so much an ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ as an ‘An Inconvenient Tooth’. But this is real-life practical stuff. Every day, millions of people face the same challenge I did.

They want to do the right thing. Yet if the anti-car zealots make it so difficult or expensive to use public transport, then they are shooting themselves in the foot with such perverse disincentives. Does the car have a future? As long as the environmental lobby maintains its stranglehold on public transport it does. It’s the only way to get around. Toot toot!