h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Surely in this day and age the only decent, honourable and polite thing to do with your car is leave it on your drive and let it rust.
Driving causes so many social, economic and ecological problems, and most people do it mainly to avoid the risk of sitting next to someone smelly on the bus.
Humans are the dominant life form on this planet, not the car, but take one look at our cities and see how they are designed primarily with traffic in mind, not people.
Abandon your car and force a change in the affordability and reliability of public transport.
Sorry to sound like a hippy, but I really do believe this. Take a look at where you live and just think how much nicer it would be without cars.

I assume that you must live in one of those rare places (like London) that actually has some viable form of public transport. For many of us there is no real option to the car as the only form of public transport is the bus which has the following problems:-

1) Bus stops are usually miles from where you live - so how do you get to the bus stop in the first place?

2) Buses come about once every 2 hours - I cannot schedule my life so that I only travel when the bus company thinks it can viably run a bus.

3) Bus stops are wet and cold and I hate them.

4) Other public transport travellers are often smelly and sometimes dangerous. I generally do not want to be near them.

5) Buses go via perversely devious routes so that they can pick up as many passengers as possible. This means that a typical bus journey takes about twenty times longer than in a car. I do not have enough time available in the day to journey by bus!

6) Just like at the start of the journey, buses do not go where I want them to so how do I get from where the bus stops to where I want to go to?

7) How do I carry anything of any significant size or weight (e.g shopping) on a bus??

8) Buses often stop running before I want to go home!

It is a valid point that cars pollute but surely we should take the approach of reducing or removing this pollution rather than taking the 'ban the car' stance.

Personal transport is something that has become part of our culture and cannot now be taken away. Sometimes public transport makes more sense but in most cases (outside London) it most definitely does not.

I am sorry to rant on but I get infuriated by the anti-car (or in fact the anti-anything) lobby. Provide better alternatives and people will change.

You mention the social, economic, etc. problems out there, and also the good ole favourite the smelly person on the bus (or the nutter, the skinhead, the fat bloke, the pisshead, the dead bloke for that matter) - all of these are exactly why I have to remain in my family sized saloon, and yes, even if I do drive it with no one else in it but me. Why should I risk my life, my health, my sanity by exposing myself to all of this? Are you kidding? Get the bus? Get the f**k outta here!

Nothing pleases me more that cruising the mile to the local shops, safe in my airbagged, climate controlled, dust and pollen filtered and generally cosseting car. Thanks you Henry and Messrs Daimler and Benz. Thank you all. I live in the countryside, so the next point here is entirely true as well - how in the heck am I supposed to get to work (around the country) by relying on public transport. I'd have to return before I departed in order to make it on time (I know, that won't work).

Forget it!

(I'd just to like to say that I fully appreciate that the above is not a popular view, and in part I may be playing Devil's Advocate in order to just piss you off a little, but hey, c'est la vie, non?).