Sunday, March 26, 2023
There have been many times this month when I have pondered what question would be more useful to ask myself then ‘Can I give up on driving?’ With access to a car and quite a few work meetings outside of Southampton, I haven’t found it so easy to get my head around relying entirely on public transport.
A couple of weeks ago, I did venture to Basingstoke by public transport. I am lucky enough to have two train stations within ten minutes’ walk of where I live, so no excuse. When I got to Basingstoke, I had to take a taxi as two consecutive Stagecoach buses to my destination were cancelled. On my way back, I waited for 30 minutes for a bus to Basingstoke train station, because the electronic bus timetable kept showing buses that never arrived.
Had I known the buses were going to be cancelled, I would have walked and got to my destination in half an hour. This happens regularly in Southampton too.
The return train journey cost me just under £15 and the taxi £7, which is not far off the cost of driving there. While doing my research on comparative costs, I found out that both RAC and AA have fuel cost calculators, which I don’t think I have ever looked at before.
However, when I had to go to Portsmouth, what made me jump in the car, was the thought that I could pass the household recycling centre to get rid of some items I couldn’t throw in the bin, and that on the way back I could stop at the garden centre and grab a few bags of soil for my veggie plot. That’s Ok, isn’t it? Although, a more environmentally friendly option would have been to find a friend who’d be keen to go to these places, and then we would have shared the journey… but I didn’t think about it… Like many of us, I am so used to having things when I want them… on my own terms. I am 100% certain that my friends would help, if I could just get over the ‘want it now’ impulse!
Many years ago, when I worked on a C4 documentary series, in a remote Romanian village with one main road, and I drove a 12-seater minibus, the villagers used to phone each other as they saw me passing through, so I would be flagged down to give lots of lifts. It was part of the community life that people would share the resources.
So, have we got anything like this locally, I wondered? A quick internet research brought up a ‘Lift share’ scheme advertised on Southampton City Council’s My Journey. Liftshare is a nationwide rather than a local scheme, set up in 1998 by Ali Clabburn, a self-described ‘commutologist’ who got his inspiration from using a car-share scheme in Germany. There are quite a few nationwide car-share schemes, but in Southampton, so far, I only came across the Lift-share schemes set up by
the University of Southampton and the Southampton Science Park.
Do you know of any Southampton based car sharing schemes, and more importantly, have you used any?
