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- [00:14]
A
We traveled over 250 billion miles by car in the UK last year. That's according to figures from the UK's Department of Transport. In every region in England except London, more than 70% of commuters travel to work by car in London. That figures just 33%. I've been in my car for about two miles now and according to a quick Google search, in my 2014 Corsa, I've emitted about 350 grams of carbon emissions. That's the same as boiling the kettle five times. So in a country where cars account for 90% of transport emissions, according to the RAC foundation and we're already being encouraged to drive less for environmental reasons, I want to find out what can be done to reduce our reliance on cars. Welcome to lseiq, an award winning podcast where we ask social scientists and other experts to answer one intelligent question. I'm Mike Wilkerson from the IQ team where we work with academics to bring you their latest research and ideas and talk to people affected by the issues we explore. Having just moved from London to a pretty rural part of the uk, I really felt like I needed to drive. So I took and passed my test last year. But it made me wonder how much do we really need to drive? I found out why that empty bus lane in back to back traffic is actually a good thing. And whether driverless cars will make rural parts of the UK easier to get to.
- [01:49]
B
Lets step back for a moment and think about what the car is really promising us to do.
- [01:56]
A
That's Philip Rhoad, the director at LSE Cities. I spoke to him about his research into how we can overcome car dependence in cities.
- [02:04]
B
The car was meant to be a machine to allow us to overcome physical proximity. If you go back and you look at car commercials from the 1920s and 30s, it's and also at the design of these vehicles. They were meant to be used in rural settings. They were the solution to accessibility shortcomings and problems in areas where you don't have the shop next door, where you don't have the workplace across the street or three, four tube stops, but where you may have to drive with your car 10, 20 minutes. It's therefore not a coincidence that even today some politicians still refer to the car being the solution to rural areas and the problem in cities and urban areas. And there is a contradiction in terms because if you do want to maybe pursue accessibility that is based on proximity and density and mixed uses and shared public space, the enormous space requirements of transportation driving pose a real threat to the equation of Urbanity.
- [03:15]
A
When you get Those keys At 17, 18, the world becomes more open to yourself. And I feel that is the case for me personally in the countryside. But within cities that freedom to drive is being stripped back. Can you give me your opinion on this kind of loss of freedom to drive within cities?
- [03:31]
B
You speak to teenagers. I happen to be living with two. The freedom to navigate the city is, is already provided at a much earlier stage than when they are allowed to drive. There's one major association I'm sure almost every teenager has in London that the freedom is provided by Transport for London. TfL actually has an exceptional reputation amongst youths in allowing them to navigate quite a vast territory. So here we have a much earlier experience of freedom provided by public transport. And the other dimension is of course, that where you have good cycling infrastructure. And this is where London has learned from many European continental cities that sense of freedom can then even be extended to individual mobility. And that's, I think, where we would want to make the big difference traditionally between something you may experience when you go into your car. You can just drive at any moment and go wherever you want, sort of perceive. I recognize that that traditionally felt very different from particular public transport that has a very low interval where you need to plan ahead and you feel somehow your ability to choose flexibly where you want to go on the spot is sort of compromised. But if you were to now compare the actual freedom of saying, like, I'm in a specific location in inner London, not just central London, and within the next 30 minutes I want to be there or there, you take out your mobile phone, you enter sort of your different options. It shows you how expensive these different options are and how long it will take. And I think youths experience through that moment of checking in essentially mobility and accessibility, potentially even a far greater sense of freedom than what it means to not only having then to drive, having to drive, concentrate, prepare, maintain a vehicle, deal with insurance, all sorts of tax, make sure you also get your license in the first place. I mean, there's a lot around it leave aside than the cost. For the vehicles itself, mobility and accessibility is provided in an alternative and possibly even better way. I think the moment of freedom which you may experience driving very quickly deteriorates.
- [06:05]
A
So for Philip, that illusion of freedom that driving brings is just that. It's an illusion. In cities especially, we have so much freedom in the choice that we have in terms of mode of transport that we want to take. Owning a car comes with a lot of responsibility, cost and care over the.
- [06:21]
C
Sort of 2000s in London, there was a real shift in terms of how people travelled away from the car, particularly like going into central London in the morning peak, a big shift away from the car and towards walking, cycling and public transport.
- [06:34]
A
That's Rachel Aldred, a professor of transport at Westminster University. She's worked closely with Transport for London on projects which aimed to reduce car usage and was involved in the Mini Holland project which which transformed the whole area in Walthamstow, East London. The project aimed to make three boroughs as cycle friendly as their Dutch equivalents, where more than 50% of journeys are made by bike.
- [06:55]
C
Roughly the figures when we're talking about people entering central London in the Weekday morning peak 2001, there were like 137,000 people coming in by car and something like 13,000 by bike. And then by the time you get to 2011, it's 6,67,000 by car and 33,000 by bike.
- [07:13]
A
So within the space of 10 years, the share of commuters traveling into London by car dropped drastically. If you're standing at Liverpool street station in 2001, you'd see one cyclist go by and 10 cars, but now it's near enough one cyclist and just two cars.
- [07:28]
C
And if you think about, if you were a TFL planner, like a city that is growing, the population is growing, the roads are congested, there's not, you know, a lot of the public transport is congested as you tube is congested. And if you get more people, even if they don't drive as much as existing people, you're going to get problems. So TFL planners looking at those kind of figures and thinking, well, people are driving less, people are cycling more, maybe, you know, this is something that we should invest in. So, yeah, I think there's clearly policy has an impact on behavior, but I think also in some regards, people's choices, people's decisions have changed and that has then contributed to policy changes change.
- [08:03]
A
Do you think public transport is good enough in London for us to not have to drive?
- [08:09]
C
Yeah, I mean, the question is always who is the we and who needs to drive? I guess. But certainly in terms of a mass method of transport, we should be aiming at things being good enough that, you know, for most people, for most trips, there isn't any need to use a private vehicle. And I think public transport, it kind of varies, you know, it's too expensive, often it's. It depends where you're going and when you're going often as well. So, you know, in London, the radial links, the links into the centre by all kinds of modes, whether it's buses or cycles, are generally better than particularly getting around across orbitally across outer London as well. And this has really come into relief with the pandemic as well, because one of the things that has happened with the pandemic is that people are commuting less, though perhaps they're going into the office three days a week rather than five. Does that mean that things are more sustainable? Well, not necessarily, because in London the commuting is relatively sustainable, certainly going to central London. People are generally not driving into work in central London, even if they own a car. On the other hand, people are potentially having time that they make other trips that don't go into central London. So perhaps they're going shopping in Outer London, they're visiting friends and so on. And those trips are more likely to be by car. So it's tricky. And there needs to be better provision for public transport, walking and cycling for those trips as well. But it is often challenging because to make space for pedestrians, for people to cycle, for buses, you know, whatever it is, the, the space and the time needs to come from somewhere. And that somewhere, you know, is going to be space for private motor vehicles. And that is always difficult wherever you are.
- [09:50]
A
There's a lot of backlash from drivers around this point. It's space they're used to having on the road. It's being repurposed for public transport or bikes, and some are not happy about it. Here are some videos I saved with people complaining about the low traffic neighborhoods and the Mini Holland program Rachel was involved with, which took away that space for cars and repurposed it for walking and cycling. They've literally blocked all the side roads.
- [10:13]
B
Making everyone go on the main road.
- [10:15]
A
Literally, innit? Yeah, and we're paying for this.
- [10:17]
D
It's also impacting all the local businesses.
- [10:20]
C
Because people are being forced onto these main arterial routes. Those routes are now absolute gridlock. All the sort of small roads in the area as well, which have now been blocked off, can't be used. People simply cannot get about.
- [10:36]
B
So the figure is 50 kilometers per hour. You have this shadow area ahead or behind you, sort of the distance you need to keep to drive safely.
- [10:46]
A
Philip and I are talking about the amount of space a car takes up when traveling at a certain speed. He's telling me how much space a personal vehicle can take up, not just when moving, but when stationary too, per car.
- [10:56]
B
Typically. Nowadays it's only 1.2 people average occupancy. It's actually not a lot of people. And since then we have been building up the statistics around this. Let's just take sort of a three lane motorway and how many people you move there. If you're lucky, it's 3,4000 per hour in direction. If you have a two lane, one direction bus rapid transit lane. And Bogota, where they observed this in the field. So this is empirically tested data, it's 40,000 people. So with less space you move many, many, many more. Not just a factor of 2, 3, but a factor well over 10.
- [11:37]
A
I'm stopped in traffic now. And using Philip's example from the research he did in the capital of Colombia, Bogota, he found that in the same amount of time, 4,000 people travel by car in three lanes of traffic. A single bus lane can move 40,000 people, that's 10 times that of cars in three times less space.
- [11:56]
B
And then you can always relate it back to the amount of space an individual consumes. So that sort of static perspective is now fairly established. And on that basis we discuss what percentage of the width of the road should be dedicated to what type of purpose. Interesting stat from Mexico City when I worked there, that about 20% at the time were driving in the city using about 80% of the public space.
- [12:21]
A
Okay, so to break down this stat and keep up with the transport theme, just imagine getting on a train with 10 carriages and 80% of people need to use two of the carriages, whilst the other 20% could use the other eight.
- [12:33]
B
So that's sort of the ratio now on top of this. And this is not just in the static, we need to incorporate the temporal element. And if you look at then the parking requirements in public space, you can just see how extraordinary amount of space required by the person who owned car sort of exceeds everything else. Again, sort of intuitively somehow, I mean, people know this. But even in our research, once again we get a lot of comments where people are in a traffic jam and they see the bus lane empty and they get frustrated, they think the bus lane adds to the traffic congestion. Of course it's the opposite. That's true. And even though the bus lane is maybe only used by a bus, every 30 or 60 seconds, it transports many, many more people. And if only 5% of those people would also be driving, that bus lane would be just another congested lane. So the intuition only goes that far. Same with cycling. People see bike lanes and they always confronted with the enormous amount of metal that's being queued up and do not appreciate that each of these cyclists, they are potential drivers.
- [13:48]
A
Let's say there's 80 people on a bus moving in that bus lane, but there's only a bus every 60 seconds in just 10 minutes, that's 800 people whizzing by. Philip's point is that if 5% of those 840 people were all in their cars instead, that would be 40 extra cars on the road in just that 10 minute period. What if it was more like half an extra 400 cars on the road in just that 10 minute period?
- [14:12]
B
So if you convert it in that way, it becomes much clearer. There was a famous T shirt in the 1990s of cyclists sort of saying, like, be careful what you wish for, you know, I'm one car less. But we are now entering, I think, a moment where the space question becomes much more pronounced because there are so many competing pressures. At the lse, we have established with a Dutch foundation, the Bernard Van Lee foundation, an academy dedicated to training city leaders. How can we make the city better equipped to accommodate the very young? The child friendly city, being out in public space exploring is a very fundamental component of this. So as a result of the early childhood development agenda, or even the agenda now around teenagers, we're seeing a new demand for our public streets because we want the kids out there, we want to have youths again engaging with the city as a place of meeting. We see new economies in cities emerging around recreational and leisurely opportunities. Think of restaurants, street cafes, servicing and in the outdoors, highly desirable. And then only are we coming to these other transport alternatives. You know, the bus lane, the bike lane and all of that put together makes you realize that this conversation around how much space per use, for what purpose, for whom, how can we be fair with it, is only going to increase as more people are living in these cities and they are confronted with these changes.
- [15:53]
A
Talked about the issue of the physical space that cars take up and how giving up that space to other modes of transport isn't always met with that much positivity from other drivers especially. And while I think driving outside of the city is still needed, Rachel and Philip have convinced me driving inside cities isn't, but people are still driving. You can't get a driving test in London for seven months because there's such a backlog. This is partly still due to Covid, but it shows that the demand to learn to drive in a capital city with good, good public transport still exists. We've spoken a lot about the younger generation so far, so I thought it would make sense to actually hear from one of them. I spoke to Indira Ray, a student at LSE and a Learner driver. Having grown up in cities for most of her life, I asked her why she feels like she needs to drive.
- [16:38]
D
I have taken on the challenging task of learning how to drive. I was very anti it for a long time, but, yeah, I'm about. Maybe about 10 hours in.
- [16:47]
A
So what made you kind of initially go, right, I need to start learning because it's not actually the norm anymore.
- [16:53]
D
Yeah, I think it definitely depends where you are. So I have all my cousins live in kind of rural UK and the moment they hit 17, it's a huge deal learning how to drive. And they kept kind of like thrusting that narrative onto me and I was just rejecting it. I was like, actually, I don't need to drive. I've always been a city kid living in Hong Kong and London. I literally couldn't see the point. I also kind of developed this huge fear of learning how to drive. Almost all my associations with cars were maybe like being in a car crash in a film and you just build up this fear. But what I didn't realize, which I don't think is pushed enough, is some jobs can ask you that you need to learn how to drive, which I don't think that many people know. So when I was searching through kind of like job websites, I thought about it and I was like, I would be heartbroken one day in the future if I had this kind of dream job opportunity that I wanted to apply for. And I couldn't because I didn't know how to drive.
- [17:47]
C
So.
- [17:47]
D
So that's ultimately that was the final straw that made me want to learn.
- [17:52]
A
I asked Indira what public transport in London was like compared to the other cities she'd lived in.
- [17:56]
D
Public transport in London, maybe more than other cities is just the number one way to get around. I feel like maybe in European cities or Hong Kong and Singapore, yes, people use public transport, but also a significant number of people drive. I just feel like in London, it's, hey, how are you getting to work? I'm taking the tube. Like, how often do you actually hear a different answer to that?
- [18:16]
A
It's so true. I wanted to ask you that as well, especially with your generation. Is there like a negative stigma to. If someone was to say, oh, I drove into, say, campus today, or I drove into work, would there be almost like a feeling of, like, what? Why? Or does that not exist?
- [18:31]
D
Yeah, a little bit. I think the instant response would maybe be like, oh, where do you live? Like, how come? Do you live far out? Or I definitely think there would be judgment if you said, oh, I like, I Uber into campus every day. I think there would definitely be a bit of a judgment of how much that's costing you. I don't think there would be huge stigma if you chose to drive in, but I think it would be so logistically difficult. Like instantly, if I heard someone was driving into LSE every day, I would be like, where are you parking? How long does it take you? There would be so much.
- [19:00]
A
When talking about learning to drive, especially like 20, 25 years ago, a lot of the adverts were pushing this kind of sense of freedom, this idea of like hitting the road and being your own person. Is there still this idea that a car equals more freedom in life in cities?
- [19:15]
D
No, because I think you step outside and you have total autonomy and total freedom and you can go anywhere you want. Countryside, Yes, I definitely think so. I have heard from my uncle that my 17 year old cousin who passed a driving test about a month ago, has basically not been in the house since. So I think, yeah, if you're still in rural areas, it still equates to freedom, of course, because if you've got a bus, you know, if you want to go shopping with your friends and a bus comes once every two hours, then a car is endless amounts of freedom.
- [19:46]
A
I remember having to wait for buses for over an hour to get out of the small town I grew up in. But this was 16 years ago. Surely things have changed in rural towns to make public transport easier outside London.
- [19:58]
C
You know, often it's really difficult and it's unnecessarily difficult because for a lot of sort of smaller cities or market towns, a lot of trips are two or three miles. They should be easy to cycle, but they're not because the infrastructure is so hostile, the road conditions are so poor. So, yeah, I think things, yeah, things are uneven. I don't know. Let's see what happens.
- [20:19]
A
I asked Rachel what she thought the future of cities looked like and whether there would be a need for fewer.
- [20:24]
C
Vehicles in a city like London. Say you have got to a situation where, you know, a lot of people use different methods of public transport. They are potentially open to alternatives to walking or cycling, more to using different types of public transport. If you're in a situation where most people use the car for most trips, it's quite hard to get any change, whether it's the bus or the bike or walking. So in London, you know, you are in quite a positive position in that regard. You know, there's many London boroughs where people, you know, cut the proportion of car Owning households is less than the proportion of households without a car. So I think, I think that's. That that looks relatively hopeful. What I worry about is this kind of unevenness as well and the fact that, you know, different parts of London have very different access to public transport, but also different cities and towns.
- [21:14]
A
There's a clear divide when it comes to some cities and more rural parts of the UK when we look at public transport. Rachel's point about this freedom of choice we have in cities just doesn't exist yet in most parts of the uk. But regardless of where you live, there is one thing that has been promised to transform our experience of commuting. It's been built specifically to make our lives easier and, and reduce congestion and travel time. It's the driverless car. But is it really the solution to reducing our dependence on cars in rural areas and cities alike? Last year the UK government passed the Automated Vehicles act, which means that self driving vehicles could be on British roads by next year. So could that be the answer? We don't need to drive, AI will just do it instead. I asked Chris Tennant from LSE's Department of Psychological and Behavioral Science what he thought.
- [22:01]
E
Clearly, already technology can, you know, facilitate sort of smoother public transport in terms of the way that you access it, but in terms of whether the technology can sort of improve the actual sort of delivery of transportation solutions. I mean, I think it certainly could, but that's not where the focus is. The focus is clearly at the moment on the idea that let's just make the car better. And so I think that's unfortunate because it's clearly possible that you could get more people onto public transport if the public transport was better, if you changed the culture so that it didn't feel like public transport took away your autonomy. And this idea that you have to have a car because it's the only way to do it.
- [22:50]
A
Self driving cars will be on British roads in 20, 20, 26. How much do you think this will become the norm immediately in 2026? Will we see that many self driving.
- [23:00]
E
Cars, the idea of it being kind of widespread or covering many different situations, that from my point of view is a long way off. And you can see the way that it works in places in the States where there's a very gradual rollout of at the moment, taxi services in places like San Francisco, Arizona, but even there the proportion of total transport is very small. And the reason for that is it's too expensive. I mean, it's heavily subsidized by tech Companies who have a lot of resources. So the idea that you can then have huge quantity of driverless vehicles because they need, in a sense, constant support, not just sort of physical support to be kept on the road to make sure the sensors and so forth are clean or whatever. But it's the fact that they need, you know, an operational backup so that when things arise on the road, someone can resolve that situation which would be normally resolved by the human driver. Is it ready? I mean, it's ready when it's boring. But that's the whole point about automation. Automation has always automated the easy, predictable first and then hand it back to the human to deal with the ship. Basically.
- [24:28]
A
A lot of the times we talk about driving in cars in cities, we talk about space and the amount of space they take up. Now, not in 2026, but in the kind of near future, could you see driverless cars aiding in that kind of freeing up of space within cities?
- [24:42]
E
No, the reason that, I mean, they could do, if we chose for them to do so. But in a sense we've not chosen to prioritize public transport over private vehicles. And unless we choose to do that, then it's not going to happen. We have to choose as a society that we'd rather this technology went into expanding the public transport network, having lots of driverless buses or driverless shuttles to do last mile solutions off, you know, when people get off the Metro or whatever. But if we don't choose to do that, then it's not going to happen. These cars will be, there'll be more and more of them. I mean, it's just like the early stages of Uber. You know, there was a fall in number of people on public transport because they thought Uber works. And at that stage it was really quite cheap. And people have to be made to get along with their fellow citizens because, you know, most of the surveys will say that people are a bit anxious about sharing a vehicle or sharing a sort of small pod or whatever with other people. They'd love to get into a private vehicle if it was affordable. So we have to change that, those assumptions. Otherwise all this promise of fewer vehicles is, you know, we'll just have more of them doing, you know, some of them will be coasting around with no one in them.
- [26:07]
A
We always end the episode with the question that is the title of the podcast. So just wanted to ask you, do you think we need to drive to.
- [26:14]
E
Live, work and enjoy the current world? I would say most people aged sort of 25 probably still need to think about learning Strive. Will you need to in 20 years time? Possibly not. But again, I don't see the accessibility of the remote country that we're all encouraged to enjoy. I don't see the accessibility of that with a public transport or driverless vehicle solution. Even in that timescale for Indira, freedom.
- [26:46]
A
Still does mean passing your driving test.
- [26:48]
D
This country is predominantly not cities, it's countrysides, it's country lanes, it's very intricate little streets. And we still need to drive. And I think for a long time in the future we're going to still need to drive. The way we drive might change. We might have driverless cars, there may be more public transport, less cars on the road, especially if we start getting more concerned about climate change. But we definitely still need to drive.
- [27:12]
A
Rachel, do you think we still need to drive?
- [27:14]
C
In big cities, increasingly there is provision for alternatives and most people are starting to have different alternatives. I think it depends very much where you are. I think different things need to be done in more rural areas. I mean, there's definitely a role for E bikes with infrastructure, for instance, that can help there. So, yeah, I wouldn't say it's not possible, but at the moment it is the big cities that are reducing the need for a car fastest. And that's kind of understandable.
- [27:40]
A
For Philip, the answer to whether we need to drive or not is clear, but he still understands the pull of driving.
- [27:46]
B
I don't think we need to drive. I think the question is crystal clear in inner city areas well serviced by public transport, ability to walk and cycle with mixed use and density, where the accessibility is produced by the urban system. I recognize that there is a lot of suburban context where we have often deliberately deprived people from alternative choices. And I think that's something where we need to do much more about. I'm a strong believer that humans should continue experiencing the piloting of all sorts of things. To just hand this over to machines would be a very sad thing for us to, you know, whether it's a kayak, it's a bike, it's a glider, it's a car. These are very meaningful moments.
- [28:46]
A
This episode was produced by me, Mike Wilkerson, with script support from Sophie Mallet. To find out more about the research in this episode, please head to the Show Notes. And if you enjoy iq, please leave us a review. If you like this podcast, you might also like the LSE Events podcast, which features talks by some of the most influential figures in the social sciences. Listen to a recent talk, for example, by Dr. Samuel Gregg as he reflects on the current state of Western society and the origins of the term neoliberalism. For more inspiring content, search LSE lectures and events wherever you get your podcast. Coming next on lseiq, Jess Winterstein asks, are we losing our communities.