You can be as anti car as you like but it is rather more than "some people" who own and use one as people vote with their feet and clearly prefer to drive. As for being environmentally disastrous the move to electric cars will reduce that argument, and as for "expensive", well I am afraid that even with my senior railcard it is often cheaper to drive especially with 2 or more people travelling. Yes rail has a great future too, but living in a world where millions of people will give up their cars is not going to happen.
I would suggest that millions could give up their own private cars (in that people are starting to do so).
The reason being is that cars are fairly expensive to own and once people look at the whole life costs (not just the fuel) of their cars they are starting to realise that they can probably do without their second or third cars.
If I were to buy a car for £5,000 and sell it for £2,000 three years later then that's £1,000 a year.
Add in VED £140, insurance £500 and servicing & MOT £160, that's £1,800 for the year before I've driven anywhere.
However that's assuming I've got a good no claims discount, are being fairly modest in the type of vehicle that I own and I'm not paying interest on a loan to buy the vehicle.
It is hard to find a lease car for less than £150/month which would be £1,800 before insurance. Up it to £175 a month and it's risen to £2,100 a year.
The problem with finding the true cost of car ownership is that there's so many costs which are paid at different times.
The easiest way to find out is to have a credit card which you solely use for car related costs (ideally paying off the balance each month), as at the end of the year they helpfully provide you with a summary of your yearly costs.
Then work out the cost per mile on the number of miles you travel. Is certainly going to be a lot more than the 10-15p per mile in fuel costs which most people evaluate their car costs when comparing with road travel.
As a household we have one car, having two would certainly be easier, however even when I was spending £2,000 in train travel to get to and from work there was no way I could make the sums work to make a car cheaper. Especially given that it was a 30 mile round trip to work and back. Even adding in £500 worth of other personal travel costs.
In terms of time savings, even with a change in the trains and the trains doing two sides of the triangle (with the car taking the direct route), traffic was so bad that on a very good day going by car was broadly the same journey times. Yes there were a few bad train journeys, but driving was more variable the times that I do it often being noticeably longer on a not particularly bad day.
Yes it's not practical for everyone, however things like car clubs are starting to make it more and more practical.
Without the railways (or buses, or cyclists, or whichever node of travel you wish to demonise as they cost the country money which is your taxes and/or get in your way for a few seconds when you are trying to get somewhere) the roads would be a lot worse for the vast majority of people. Not only through congestion; but through pollution, division of communities, lack of parking spaces, and the like.
To give you an idea of the level of impact something like 5% of journeys are made by rail, compare this to the circa 2% daily variations in traffic and compare the days where traffic is bad for no real reason and the days where it goes well. Those bad days would be the "normal" and the good (term time) days would probably be what it is like during the school holidays.
