Is there a transport problem?

I’m not going to deny that the world, especially in MEDCs, have sustainable transport issues. In this day and age, technology has grown so rapidly it has gone beyond thinking about being sustainable.

Fifty years ago, a household would be lucky to own a car due to the expense of buying and running them. Nowadays, ‘The proportion of households in Great Britain with access to a car increased from 52 percent to 75 per cent between 1971 and 2007. Over the same period, the proportion of households without access to a car almost halved, from 48 per cent to 25 percent (National Statistics, 2009)’. Today it can be seen as “normal” for a household to own more than one car. National Statistics (2009) states that there has been an increase of 19 percent from 8 percent in 1971 to 27 percent in 2007 of households owning two cars, and an increase of 5 percent from 2 percent in 1971 to 7 percent in 2007 of households owning 3 cars.

These days, transport plays an important role in everyday life as people rely on it to get to work, to go shopping, to visit family, to go on holiday and so on. Without the use of cars, people would be limited to where they worked in relation to their home, how far away from family they may want to move. Although it is argued that people should be less reliant on cars and use public transport more often. By doing so, this will primarily cut down on the amount of greenhouse gases being emitted and will also reduce congestion.

It is in my opinion that despite the amount of harm cars are doing to the environment, cutting down on car use and replacing it with public transport is easier said than done. I can particularly relate this to myself as I have a car at university of which I use regularly as I travel home every weekend to work. The government continue to encourage more sustainable transport, especially walking, cycling and using buses if possible, yet not enough people are doing something about it. I find, just like a lot of other people, that the use of public transport is not as reliable as using your own car and can be much more time consuming. Public transport is not available as and when you need it compared to your car, for example; buses and trains only come at certain times and only go to certain destinations. If travelling a long distance and you took the train, you not only have to pay for the train but the transport to get you to and from the train stations as well, therefore it can work out much more costly.

The demand for fossil fuels is forever increasing, with prices constantly fluctuating dependent upon how much of the fossil fuels are available. If the demand for these fuels continues to increase, more people may resort to using alternative transport methods than their own car. I believe that if public transport was made cheaper and came on a more regular basis, people would end up preferring to use other methods of transport. Despite no major action being undertaken at the minute, I do agree that something has to be done about the use of cars in the long run. I am concerned about the depletion of fossil fuels, there is only so much time left until we completely exhaust our resources, and then where do we go from there?

References

National Statistics (2009) Car Access: More households than ever have a car [online] UK: National Statistics. Available from: http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=1770