Originally Posted by
McD
I agree with pretty much everything you’ve said here.
The only addition I’d make to this point, is that those huge SUV’s do cause a huge amount of problems, but there are many smaller SUV style cars that aren’t any bigger than other cars’ footprints, of which a huge proportion have 1ltr and 1.2ltr engines. For example, a Vauxhall cross lane has a similar footprint to a Corsa, the Grandland similar to an Astra, in terms of the space they take up.
I completely agree about the huge Audi Q7s and similar sized vehicles, they are unnecessarily oversized, as are some saloon cars.
Many manufacturers are turning to SUV type cars, Volkswagen for example must have about 7 of those styles in their range when you include crossover types. Perhaps some government legislation about maximum car sizes could help? More heavily tax the purchase and use of cars over a certain physical size and/or engine size? I’m asking that as a genuine point, I’m keen to hear other’s viewpoints on how we fix a growing problem whilst still supporting people’s abilities to move themselves and families around towns and cities.
I think a multi-tier approach may be the best way to address the situation - traffic infrastructure given better investment and maintenance, affordable, reliable and not overly time consuming public transport, incentives (positive and negative) to get out the car and use public transport, huge efforts put into public awareness of the damage (on all levels) caused by excessive traffic, joined up approaches with governments and local authorities all singing from the same hymn sheet across Scotland and the uk, and probably more than that. All of that costs a lot of money though.
On a related point, I’m interested in your thoughts J-C, as a taxi driver, and anyone else who is on the city centre frequently - logic would suggest that in this new age of hybrid working and working from home being much more prevalent than pre-covid, that the volume of traffic would be less than pre-covid, but evidence such as you’ve given here, and from others, and my own experience, is that traffic seems even busier/greater than before covid, what do you think?
