According to a survey carried out for car repair and maintenance chain Kwik Fit, almost seven million motorists in the UK plan to reduce their use of the car, especially for short journeys.
In 2019, 7% of car journeys in the UK were less than one mile, while a further 17% were between one and two miles. Combined, almost a quarter of all car journeys in the UK are short enough to walk in minutes.
Jumping into cars for such incredibly short distances not only increases air pollution, it also causes congestion and increases the danger on the road.
The UK government’s independent advisory group, the Committee on Climate Change, recommends a reduction in kilometers traveled by car and a massive increase in walking and cycling.
“Car travel dominates emissions from surface transport,” said a report by the Committee on Climate Change published in 2020.
“Opportunities exist to reduce the demand for car travel, through both social and technological changes and by enabling journeys to shift to low-carbon modes of transport,” the report continues.
And advocating less motor traffic is also an imperative of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC is the United Nations organization focused on climate science. Our planet is expected to reach the critical threshold of 1.5°C warming due to human-caused climate change within the next 20 years, and reducing motor traffic is one way to reduce this risk , say UN experts.
“Climate change is not a problem of the future, it is here and now,” said Friederike Otto of the University of Oxford, one of the IPCC experts.
“This is not remote science; it’s about where we live and work,” said IPCC co-chair Dr Debra Roberts, adding: “we can choose how we move around cities.”
Active travel
Kwik Kit estimates that 20 million UK drivers regularly use their cars for journeys of between one and two miles, but that around 6.9 million want to switch to other travel methods.
When asked about their trips on trips of less than 1.5 miles, 13% of motorists said they wanted to bike on more of those trips.
The Kwik Fit survey was carried out to support a new partnership with bike repair company Fettle to provide bike servicing at 600 of Kwik Fit’s service centres.
The first Fettle at Kwik Fit operation has opened at the Kwik Fit center in Cheltenham Road, Bristol, with centers in London to follow in the coming weeks and a plan to roll out the partnership to centers across the UK.
The Kwik Fit survey found that the cost of motoring was the key factor in the planned reduction in road miles, but 26% of the representative sample also cited the environmental impact of a short car journey , while 17% said it was because other modes of travel, especially cycling – are as fast, or even faster, than motoring.
Mark Slade, MD of Kwik Fit, said: “This research shows that there are many reasons why drivers are looking to different modes of travel for short journeys, and we can support them by removing some of the barriers when it comes to increase cycle use.”
He added: “An increasing number of our customers who operate fleets of vehicles have been asking if we can support their expanding cargo bike operations, which are increasingly being used for short urban journeys.”
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