Jayne Dowle: Making life harder for drivers helps no-one

The details vary from region to region, but the gist is that workers are being coerced – sorry, encouraged – to share cars or leave them at home and either walk, cycle or use public transport instead.

Evidently, it is in the name of setting a good example in the fight against obesity, saving the environment and allowing car parks to be used for something else deemed more important by the big bosses.

Sharing cars is obviously sensible. With the price of petrol and diesel as it is, anyone who can find a friend with whom to split travelling costs would be silly not to jump at the chance.

It’s the “walking”, “cycling” and “public transport” elements which people are finding difficult to put into practice. And let’s not forget, this is people we are talking about, not flags on a map which can be simply moved around with no impact at all on personal circumstances. That’s people with heavy bags and files and shopping to carry, people with appointments with colleagues in other towns and cities to keep, people with children to collect from school and elderly relatives to check up on. People with lives, in other words, who need convenient and reliable transport to get from A to B to back again and then perhaps onwards to C.

In the majority of circumstances, I am afraid that the simple solution to meet these ongoing daily challenges is a car on the road.

Like it or not, the pace of modern life demands the flexibility that your own wheels can offer. It is not a luxury, it’s a necessity, and like my friend in the NHS, I am becoming heartily sick of hearing about green travel plans, parking charges going up in town centres and everything else that seems to gang up in a concerted campaign to persecute the driver.

Does any one of us really think that standing at a bus stop for an hour waiting for a bus which might never turn up is the best use of a highly-trained, highly-paid NHS manager’s time?

Of course it isn’t, but this is a very real scenario because some “expert” has deemed that this person’s car is a scourge upon the planet and it is the interests of us all to turn back the clock and force them onto the bus.

What is so offensive about a row of cars parked neatly outside a hospital or office building that it must be obliterated? Do those responsible for drawing up these travel plans really think that bike racks and workplace showers are acceptable replacements for a safe and secure place for a worker to leave their vehicle and go and do their shift?

It is not just the NHS where this is happening but across the public sector, including local authorities, colleges and universities. Healthy living? It is doing nothing but cause stress. If this obsession with removing the car is allowed to get a foothold, soon we’ll all be trailing across town in the rain with our shopping to the only affordable car park, or standing at that bus stop waiting for a bus that never comes.

The National Institute for Clinical Excellence, the body which sets standards for healthcare, wants walking and cycling to “become the norm” for all short journeys to work , to school or to go shopping, and town halls are being urged to restrain urban car use with tighter car park restrictions and higher parking fees. That’s such a great idea in this recessionary retail climate, isn’t it?

Councils are already struggling to encourage people to use town centres and hate having to announce any increase in parking fees as it is; the last thing they need is to be put under even more pressure.

Families should even be encouraged to sell their cars, say the experts at NICE, to help us ditch the “bad habit” of driving. You have ask whether some of these so-called experts actually live on this planet, or exist in another universe where everyone is issued with a free pass for public transport and no-one ever needs to be anywhere on time.

In our busy lives, we take for granted the ability to get ourselves to a certain place. We should all be free to make our own decisions about how we might go about doing that, but bullying and blackmailing us into doing it a certain way is wrong.

If we don’t shout up now about this wrong-headed obsession with obliterating the car and all that goes with it, we will only have ourselves to blame.

I know this sounds selfish, but it is time to get real about what our roads are for – and that’s for us.