Lewes Forum thread

ACT - if cars are so important to people who buy houses in Lewes, why are roads with no off-street parking - such as Grange Road and its surroundings - the most popular and expensive (per sq ft) places to live in the town?

From previous thread...
Oh dear, oh dear indeed Mercian. Do excuse me for disagreeing with you, but please climb down off you high horse and read your own posts before spouting off in such a condascending fashion.
You said, and I quote verbatim:-
"Good train links are no use at all unless your final destination also has them. I regularly make journeys to places where train links are non-existent or so poor that you're likely to have jumped under a train long before you get on one"
That doesn't mean you have to own one, does it? I simply hire cars when I need them for difficult journeys, it works out cheaper than owning one given that I get most places i need to (including my daily job) on the train. The way forward is car pools or car clubs.
I see no mention of 'a particular instance in Lewes' or 'one place with a particular issue'. So, you do in fact appear to be stating your point of view for general debate, capice?....
Furthermore, are you seriously suggesting that Lewes residents who have to drive to work should be expected to move to other cheaper areas of Sussex to make way for more rail commuters to move into the town? Yeah right. It is more than likely the influx of rail commuters into Lewes that has created the need to shoehorn as many properties as possible into any small space in the first place.

"Furthermore, are you seriously suggesting that Lewes residents who have to drive to work should be expected to move to other cheaper areas of Sussex to make way for more rail commuters to move into the town? "
I'm not asking anyone to move, am I? We are talking about the provision of a few new homes (I thought that was obvious from the context of the thread).
I am suggesting that the buyers of those homes are probably going to be rail commuters - or perhaps should be encouraged to be rail, walking or cycle commuter,s given the scarcity of land and Lewes' connections to Brighton or London.
If you want to move (yes, move - we are talking about buyers of new homes, not existing residents) to somewhere with extensive parking, perhaps Lewes isn't the best place to look. Perhaps Lewes isn't the best place to build houses with extensive parking. That is all.
I am not suggesting (i) that drivers should be forced to move out of LEwes or that (ii) new homes in less constrained, less historic, less expensive locations or those less well served with public transport should not have parking provision.

"Please explain", Mercian was quoting ACT for a significant part of that post, which makes it very difficult to disentangle his comments on her post and your comments on both of them.

I am often accused of being condescending on this forum. What that often seems to boil down to is (a) expressing an opinion with which someone else disagrees, and (b) doing it grammatically and coherently. I'm not sure why this is necessarily patronising.

As it happens Mercian makes a very valid point - in my opinion, obviously. There are an awful lot of cars of which a fair proportion are parked all day long. I don't know what the figures are, but in urban areas the majority of vehicles are sitting unused. It's also very expensive to run a car - the AA quotes around £2400 per annum for even the cheapest vehicle, and that's before you drive it anywhere. The problem is, of course, that once you've paid the standing charges it's cheaper to run it more often, so the temptation is to do exactly that and that contributes to a poorer quality of life for everyone.

Car pools relate to people sharing vehicles on regular journeys, but car clubs ought to be far more commonplace and also more affordable. Then occasional car users would have a vehicle available to them whenever they wanted - for instance to run to the shops or for a walk in the country - rather than needing to finance a car for their own exclusive use. I am not talking about the people who obviously do need a car for their exclusive use for most of the week: I'm talking about people like me who need to use a car three or four times a week but who otherwise leave it languishing outside the house.

I expect I'll be accused of being condescending etc etc, and accumulate lots of disapproving ticks, but maybe some of the rest of you with open minds will think "hmm yes, maybe there's an idea lurking in that" and maybe my fixed ideas about what is right could be reviewed.

For what it's worth I hate owning a car - it just sits there depreciating and costing me a fortune between the rare times I use it at the weekend. What I'd like is regular / easy access to a small car I could use to nip and pick up the kids from their friends etc, and then occasional access to a large car / MPV for weekends away.

I do constantly monitor car clubs & hire etc, and taking into account economics, hassle and availability, we just haven't quite reached the point where non-ownership makes sense for me. I look forward to the day when it does, and I'll ditch my own car with enthusiasm.

Hear hear, someone else. It's tricky: until the car clubs populate the streets with enough vehicles to convince people like you and me that there will generally be a car available when we want one we won't jump. The authorities will then insist that there's no demand and we'll enter the usual Catch 22 of engineering changes for the better...

Hurrah: well done, the disapproving tickmeister! No open mind then, I take it?

I was delighted to note that I attracted one in another thread which wasn't in the least contentious, where I was just being helpful. Sad really.

Does anyone know the optimum number needed for a car club?