May's been after
talking about doing this very thing for the best part of a decade.
Yes it was
First published March 2009 James May's greatest hits: parking problems By James May
11:45AM BST 02 Sep 2011
The irony of the car is that the place where it causes the greatest problem is the place where it’s most needed; that is, towns and cities. Cars are actually pretty hopeless for long journeys because they have to be driven, which is an annoying distraction. For going from London to Edinburgh the train makes much more sense, is faster, and has a bar.
Similarly, only an idiot would drive from England to Italy, not least because that would involve going through France. A Boeing 757 will do the same trip in about one tenth of the time and is, as students of youth argot would say, the way to go.
But this still leaves you needing to get to the station or airport, and that is why you will always need a car. The proponents of public transport can bang on all they like about integration, trams and the community, but nothing will ever match the convenience of something that leaves from outside your door exactly when you want to go. Therefore our towns and cities will always be full of cars.
The real problem, however, contrary to much popular belief, is not cars being driven, but cars not being driven. Over the past couple of weeks I’ve used quite a bit of public transport for long journeys, and I’ve worked out that in the past 336 hours the Fiat Panda has been in use for only eight of them, or a pathetic 2.4 per cent of the time. For 97.6 per cent of the time it’s been sitting outside by the road gathering pigeon poo. At any given time a handful of cars is doing something useful but most of the rest are simply in the way.
I don’t doubt that the issue could be partly resolved if we all bought a Smart ForTwo or a G-Wiz, but then we would simply be substituting one social problem with another, most probably widespread depression and low self-esteem.
I also have a sneaking suspicion that most Smarts are bought by rich people as a city runabout rather than as a replacement for an existing car, which means there are now one and a half cars on the street where there used to be only one.
I therefore conclude that what we really need, in the absence of any emerging folding car technology, is more garages.
I definitely need more garaging, which seems to mean a new house, so I’ve been for a walk. And I’m horrified by just how few garages there are around where I live.
In fairness most of the houses were built before the car was invented, and quite a few display blue plaques proclaiming that some Victorian essayist once stayed there, but that’s not much of an excuse. The Victorians pretty much knocked everything down and started from scratch, and it’s probably time we did that again.
Here’s my thinking. My pokey little box of a dwelling is (or was, before the country was ruined) surprisingly valuable, but the house itself doesn’t account for much of it. I know – because I have to insure it – that rebuilding it from scratch would cost no more than £150,000.
Meanwhile, a substantially bigger one with a garage and still within walking distance of the pub is going to cost an extra three quarters of a million pounds at least, plus stamp robbery and attendant fees from golf-playing conveyancers, all of which seems a very expensive way of storing a few cars.
Even then there’s more chance of finding a house where Cruikshank once drew a sketch of Oliver Twist than one where I can satisfy the requirements of a modern and progressive lifestyle.
In any case, I don’t actually want a bigger house. A bigger house means buying more furniture and rugs, more roof to fall off, and more danger of people coming to stay. I only want more garage space. It’s where I spend most of my time anyway, and that will only get worse.
So I have now decided that the inescapable conclusion to the conundrum is that I should knock this house down and then build a contemporary one with space-efficient layout, economical heating systems, low-voltage circuitry and, most importantly, a CHUFFING MASSIVE GARAGE.
Please tell me where the flaw is in this plan.
www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/columnists/jamesmay/8737224/James-Mays-greatest-hits-parking-problems.html
