How To Get Fewer Cars

I live in a historic village. Like many Brits, I enjoy telling this to New Worlders with a thinly veiled, and quite vacuous, pomposity. Fellow Brits know that "historic village" is less romantic than it sounds.

There are two reasons. The first is that "villages" can be anything smaller than a city, and so really quite large. Our conventions have been mixed up by time, but the longest standing tradition is that any settlement without a church is a hamlet, one with a church but no cathedral is a village, and anywhere with a cathedral is a city. Villages, therefore, can have many thousands of people living in them. (Towns, by the way, are a distinct designation granted by the crown).

The second reason is that almost everything is historic in Britain. You can't swing a cat without hitting the remnant of a Roman, Saxon, Viking, or Norman something or other. Construction works regularly unearth artifacts, people spend their weekends walking around with metal detectors, and you can find reasonably priced homes that are older than Napoleon.

This is all a consequence of us building in stone and brick (because we can't grow much pine here) and not being invaded since 1066. Even the Luftwaffe — by far the most devastating torment we've had — stuck to the cities and industrial areas. Suffice to say, a "historic village" could be anywhere, and they all look the same — lots of hills, narrow streets, and virtually no parking.

That parking issue is really making my tits itch. Everyone with a baby and pram has to regularly steer it into the road to get around cars that have been parked on the pavement. This is obviously the wrong way around. The worst part is that at least 80% of the people parking on the pavement own another vehicle that they've parked on their driveway… which is in front of a garage with zero cars in it. I've taken to slowly walking my dog passed every badly parked car to give him ample time to pee on it. I consider this a moral duty for all dog owners.

Now, I don't approve of this, but I do understand — some people have started keying the cars on pavements. This is where you take your door key and run it across the car's paintwork to leave a considerable scratch. I'll admit I've been tempted once or twice, after manoeuvring my son passed oncoming traffic, but I haven't done it as yet.

A better solution might be to actively encourage single car ownership, as well as smaller car ownership. A tax discount might work a little bit, but a range of other behavioural measures could be more effective. For instance, car parks could have loyalty programmes that let you have every tenth stay for free, so long as you parked the same car each time. And supermarkets could make the parking spaces near the stores much smaller than those further away. We could also have a kind of reverse traffic warden who, instead of handing out penalties for bad parking, hands out raffle tickets for good parking.

This might sound a silly, but we have evidence that drivers like silly things. One of the more effective measures against speeding isn't cameras and police, but smiley faces. Lots of villages (including mine) have speedometers on their perimeter that display a frowning red face if you're going too fast, and a smiley green face if you're within the speed limit. It's seriously heart-warming to get the smiley face, so you go slow.

Alternatively (and I really don't approve of this) we could double down on social media shaming. There is a subculture of photographing people next to their needlessly large vehicles and posting the images with the hashtag "wankpanzer". Funny, but aside from the privacy and libel implications, it requires using social media, which I've become rather against.

I prefer the friendly traffic warden type of solution. More bees with honey, and all that.

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