Re: EVs = bad for planet, bad for poor people, bad for practicality
> This is not universal of course, but given that 65% of UK households are detached & semi-detached houses (which invariably have driveways)
To counterbalance this, I suspect that a significant percentage of people living in detached and semi-detached houses will have at least two cars - one for Dad to drive to work, and one for Mum to use when taking the kids to school.
(Admittedly, we're continually moving away from the traditional family setup with 2.2 kids, but even so).
And that's before you consider the fact that thanks to Corona (and next year, Brexit, especially if we do hit no deal), there's been an upsurge of interest in camping holidays and the like. The result is a lot more caravans parked on a lot more driveways.
And as someone else noted, modern cars - especially the 4x4 monsters which have become all the rage - are often too big for standard garages, which were designed for cars which were several feet shorter and thinner than their modern equivalents.
Certainly from an anecdotal perspective, I have a family member who lives in a large cul-de-sac where virtually all the houses have a driveway and/or garage.
However, my relative has three vehicles: a work van, a small car for his wife to do shopping etc, and a people carrier for when they want to take the whole family out.
And similar applies to most of the road; I'd guess two thirds of the available space is generally taken up with work vans and secondary cars.
> a non-trivial chunk of the remainder are low-density terraces with potential for parking, then I'd wager that the number of residences legitimately without parking numbers <25% - and a chunk of them will be in London where car ownership is low and frequently unnecessary anyway
Again, not sure I'd buy into that idea.
At least around Sheffield, parking spaces are generally at a premium, even with large swathes (e.g. Hillsborough) being subject to residents-only parking rules. And from what I've seen in places like Leeds and Manchester, much the same applies.
Certainly, the road I used to live on until very recently (over by Granville Road, Sheffield fans!), was generally rammed with cars, around half of which vanished in the morning, and reappeared at the end of the working day.
I'd guess that I got to park in close proximity to my house /maybe/ one time in three, unless I made a point of shifting it while everyone was at work.
Meanwhile, if I go to see a friend in Hillsborough, I'll generally end up parking several hundred meters away from their house. Perhaps ironically, up at the very top of their hill where there's some semi-detached houses with driveways, inbetween all the work vans which are also making use of this "free" space...
Any which way, it's certainly going to be interesting to see how things change over the next few years; between the aforementioned dampening effects on international travel, the government's attempts to ditch fossil fuels (and the aforementioned tax impacts thereof), the increased shift to home working *and* the fact that lockdown has pushed a not insignificant percentage of home owners to consider moving to larger houses further out from city centres.
There's a whole lot of pushing and pulling going on, which'll probably result in car ownership remaining much the same, regardless of what the government and green party would like to see.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
