Hacker News Reader

Comment by reedf1 | Hacker News Reader

My 2c as a local: I live in zone 2 and at least anecdotally I am in disagreement with your point here. So I looked it up in your link from TfL - "There are 2.56m cars licensed in London. This equates to an average of 0.3 cars per adult. In total, 46 per cent of households do not have a car, 40 per cent have one car and 12 per cent have two or more cars, with very few households owning more than two cars."

This is the same as your stated numbers, but framed in a substantially different way. In addition I suspect this is dominated by the outer boroughs; maybe one or two of my 20+ coworkers who live in zones 1-3 have a car, it's more once you get z4+.

View on HN

By Zone 5 you're basically almost back to the world of infrequent bus services and out-of-town supermarkets so it's a lot more understandable why you need a car.

Anecdotal sample from my village just outside Zone 6 (but inside M25): every single one of my neighbours has 2 cars, some have 3 (or 4). Basically every adult or young-adult member of the household who has to go somewhere on their own has a car. You could argue that they don't need that many, but take it this way: the reliability of the UK train network has become absolutely disgraceful. They are either on strike, or if they are not striking, then they are doing engineering works, and if neither of those are happening, then there is a major disruption. This means that in the last 6 months, I think there have been 2-3 weeks perhaps where the connection into London was reliable.

Unless you have a car, you are completely hosed.

Yes, that tracks with my experience too. I've found some evidence to back up our anecdotal experience here: https://centreforlondon.org/blog/car-ownership-census/

Not to mentioned the cost of using the train vs driving.

I skipped over this issue, but it's absolutely right. Train tickets are ridiculously expensive - to the degree that it's cheaper to drive into town and then pay the parking. And for this price you get absolutely abysmal service.

I don't know where public transport has gone wrong in the UK, but it is truly catastrophic even compared to the post-soviet bloc countries in Europe. In fact, those tend to have much better public transport these days.

I have some privately collected analysis that there is large scale fraud of their already poor performance metrics. It's an open scandal.

Exactly. Came here to say the same thing. I live in zone 2 and I'd say that majority of the households don't own a car because they don't need one. We only got a car after we had kids and used to Uber around when we needed a car, a lot cheaper than full time car ownership.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com