According to a survey carried out for automotive servicing and repair chain Kwik Fit almost seven million U.K. motorists plan to cut back on motoring especially for short journeys.
In 2019, 7% of UK car journeys were less than one mile, while a further 17% were between one and two miles. Added together, that’s almost a quarter of all U.K. car journeys being short enough to walk in minutes.
Hopping into cars for such incredibly short distances doesn’t just increase air pollution, it also causes congestion and increases road danger.
The U.K. government’s independent advisory group, the Climate Change Committee, recommends a reduction in miles travelled by car and a massive increase in walking and cycling.
“Car travel dominates surface transport emissions,” said a Climate Change Committee report published in 2020.
“There are opportunities to reduce demand for car travel, through both societal and technological changes and by enabling journeys to be shifted onto lower-carbon modes of transport,” continued the report.
And arguing for less motor traffic is also an imperative from the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC is the United Nations’ climate-science-focused organisation. Our planet is expected to hit the critical threshold of 1.5°C warming due to human-caused climate change within the next 20 years, and curtailing motor traffic is one of the ways to reduce this risk, say the UN’s experts.
“Climate change is not a problem of the future, it’s here and now,” stated Friederike Otto of the University of Oxford, one of the IPCC experts.
“This is not about remote science; it is about where we live and work,” said Dr. Debra Roberts, an IPCC co-chair, adding, “we can choose the way we move in cities.”
Active travel
Kwik Kit estimates that 20 million U.K. drivers regularly use their cars for journeys of between one to two miles, but that some 6.9 million want to switch to other travel methods.
When asked about their travel over journeys of less than 1.5 miles, 13% of motorists said they want to cycle on more of these trips.
Kwik Fit’s survey was carried out to support a new partnership with bike repair company Fettle to offer cycle servicing at 600 of Kwik Fit’s service centres.
The first Fettle at Kwik Fit operation has opened in the Kwik Fit centre in Cheltenham Road, Bristol, with centres in London to follow in the coming weeks and a plan to roll out the partnership to centres across the U.K.
Kwik Fit’s 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 travel modes—especially cycling—are are as fast as, or even faster, than motoring.
Kwik Fit MD Mark Slade said: “This research shows that there are many reasons why drivers are looking for different modes of travel for short journeys, and we can support them through removing some of the barriers when it comes to increased cycle use.”
He added: “A growing number of our customers who operate vehicle fleets have been asking if we can support their expanding cargo bike operations, which are increasingly being used for short urban journeys.”
