By: John Gibbons

Everyone loves their car. Probably no one possession signals success, freedom and independence than having ‘your own set of wheels’. Just ask any 17 year old with their first provisional licence…

But you can also have too much of a good thing. Ireland’s ‘fleet’ of private cars has more than doubled in the last 20 years to over 1.6 million. Boom times and access to easy bank credit have turned that dream of getting behind the wheel into a reality for hundreds of thousands of new drivers.

While 10 years ago, a significant number of children either walked or cycled to school, this has declined sharply in recent times. Most parents who drive their children even short journeys to the local school cite increased traffic as the main reason they don’t want their children to walk or cycle.

The irony, of course, is that they themselves are making the problem even worse by adding ‘avoidable’ extra journeys onto our already thronged streets. To make matters worse, Irish children are now much more likely to be overweight or obese than even a decade ago…and much of the blame for this is lack of regular exercise – such as walking or cycling to school every day!

Overcrowded streets and excessive dependence on cars also has a huge environmental impact. Locally, traffic fumes are a major source of air pollution, leading to increases in asthma and other serious respiratory problems. On a wider scale, car use, especially larger vehicles such as SUVs, are contributing directly to global warming via the C02 emissions coming out of the exhaust pipe.

As a rule of thumb, for every 6,000 miles you drive, your car emits its own weight in C02 into the atmosphere – where it will remain for at least the next 100 years, nudging global temperatures up more and more every year.

The alternative, especially now that we have a Green Environment Minister, looks a little more optimistic. Public transport in Ireland has a bad name. Late buses, slow trains, poor staff morale and filthy, ill-equipped terminals have been a turn-off for many considering leaving the car at home.

In the Dublin area, the DART and more recently the Luas, have both proven that high quality, well-maintained public transport is hugely popular. London and Paris are two excellent example of how a high frequency, integrated public transport system can keep cities of more than 10 million moving smoothly. In recent years, London has actually cracked down on cars entering the city via congestion charges.

While nobody likes new taxes, Londoners have quickly seen the positive effect of being able to move around their city once again. The crackdown on unnecessary car entry into London has been aimed most squarely at the drivers of so-called ‘Chelsea Tractors’ – these are the lumbering SUVs that are both road and parking hogs, as well as belching out far more pollution and greenhouse gases per mile than regular cars.

Chelsea Tractors face a whopping £25 charge (€40) every time they drive into central London.

In Ireland, a mere 6% of people use public transport to get to work, and the numbers have been declining as our workforce increases. The last 10 years of record growth in our economy has been the main trigger for the explosion in car ownership and usage.

Bad planning, with satellite ‘commuter’ towns only accessible to Dublin by car, has made the problem worse, forcing thousands of people to spend huge amounts of time in their cars every week. Simple, low cost steps, such as encouraging car pooling by allowing cars carrying three or more passengers to use the bus lanes, seem to be beyond the imagination of our planners.

Similarly, hammering the owners of SUVs and large-engined luxury and sports cars with carbon taxes would be a major step in the right direction, and more importantly, would send out a signal that we as a society frown on such horrendous waste of scarce resources, as well as the huge additional pollution that these vehicles generate.

For example, Toyota’s hybrid Prius emits 106 grams of CO2 for every mile it travels, so for example a round trip from Dublin to Cork in a Prius generates around 34 kilos of CO2. Take the exact same journey in an Audi Q7 and you’ve just added 105 kilos of pollution.

But SUV drivers often protest that they drive them because they are ‘safer’. Studies have shown that for children, SUVs are no safer than ordinary cars. What’s more, a pedestrian or cyclist hit by an SUV is far more likely to be killed. Also, passengers in ordinary cars are at much higher risk if hit by an SUV.

Researchers from Dublin’s TCD recently advised that SUVs should carry formal health warnings advising the drivers of the extra danger they posed to other road users.