Bourne Comment

THE UBIQUITY OF KING CAR

Britain is now littered with motor cars. They can be seen everywhere at all times of the day and night. They are a convenience and a nuisance but, more importantly, they have come to dominate our lives.

Henry Ford (1863-1947), the American industrialist and founder of the Ford Motor Company, carries much of the responsibility because he manufactured the first motor car that the man in the street could afford and then developed the assembly line technique of mass production to make it available. His introduction of the Model T automobile revolutionised transportation and in doing so, converted the motor car from an expensive curiosity into a practical conveyance that would have a profound impact on the landscape of the twentieth century.

Their manufacture quickly spread throughout the world to become the multi-billion pound industry it is today, one that embraces a wide range of companies and organisations involved in the design, development, manufacturing, marketing and selling of motor vehicles with global sales reaching 90 million a year (2013).

It is one of the world's most important economies, turning out a staggering number to meet the insatiable demand, with Toyota topping the list last year by selling 10.23 million vehicles and Volkswagen close behind with 9.92 million. The supply and demand continues unabated with China, the United States and Japan all producing eight million cars or more a year and those countries that do not manufacture import from those who do with Germany topping the list of overseas sales by selling 25% of its annual production abroad.

The result of these phenomenal sales is that King Car rules our lives. They have become more than the prestige possession or status symbol which were the driving force for wannabes years ago when ownership was far less widespread. Now they have become a necessity.

Look down your street any day and you will see motor cars at the kerbside and in the driveways. See this same scene on a quiet Sunday morning when the neighbourhood is still abed and you will be aghast at the number of vehicles there are parked in suburbia waiting for the Monday morning start, two, three, four and sometimes five outside a single address because car ownership is no longer confined to the man of the house but the wife and the kids have got to have one too once they are old enough to drive.

When I was a boy growing up in the 1930s, collecting car numbers was a perennial craze when each of us would buy a notebook to fill with the letters and numbers spotted on individual registration plates but even an entire morning spent by the side of the main road which ran past our street never produced more than a few dozen and we frequently sat there for an hour or more without seeing a single vehicle. Today, that same road where we spent so much time has become the A15 and too dangerous to cross at that point.

Unfortunately, this surge in car ownership was never envisaged. When our houses were designed a hundred years ago there were no garages, then as the motor car became popular, a single garage was the norm with double garages for the more affluent areas and so we began to see cars parked outside. Then came the building boom of recent years when more properties had garages so small that they are often unable to take a family saloon and so the car ends up on the driveway and the garage is used for storage space.

Many new estates do not even have garages at all and cars are left standing at the side of the house or even on the pavement outside and so a century after it was invented, the car has now become commonplace in every street in the land, one of the most ubiquitous objects in the world today.

The once peaceful suburbs are therefore plagued, even defaced, by the motor car but our town centres have fared even worse. The major cities have become no go areas for private motorists and even those who do venture in face the added headache of finding a parking space while the smaller towns have not fared much better.

All of this has come about because government at every level has not kept pace with the speed of change by failing to recognise the impact the motor car has been making on our daily life. The Beeching axe of 1963 which identified 2,363 stations and 6,000 miles of railway line for closure resulted in a rapid growth in car ownership with vehicle mileage growing at an annual rate of 10% between 1948 and 1964 while the failure to build bypasses for many of our traditional market towns such as Bourne now sees them choked with through traffic that poses a danger to health and safety.

Our local authorities must bear much of the blame for they are the decision makers over such vital issues as new roads and parking facilities and Bourne has not been well served over this issue. A bypass for the A15 trunk road which runs through the town centre would have helped solve our problem and although it was first suggested over 100 years ago when the motor car was beginning to make an appearance in the town, nothing was done then or has been since. Twenty years ago there appeared to be a possibility that Bourne would get a by-pass when the project was actually included in Lincolnshire County Council’s projected programme for new highways with a completion date of October 1995 but the optimism was short-lived because it was later axed when the government drastically pruned its road building programme and since then the scheme has never even been considered and is unlikely to be in the foreseeable future.

The car parking problem is similarly ignored by South Kesteven District Council for although we have a population of around 16,000 people there are only 500 public car parking spaces within the town centre area, either in designated parks or at the kerbside, which is clearly not enough because some motorists insist on hogging places all day long to the detriment of shoppers and other occasional visitors, a situation that is destined to become worse as house building continues and the population increases yet the supply is not keeping pace with the demand.

The shortage of spaces may also be the reason why cases of illegal parking are escalating with cars frequently left on double yellow lines in and around the town centre, often causing traffic jams, especially in North Street where one vehicle left in the wrong place can cause one of those lengthy and chaotic delays for which Bourne is becoming notorious.

The result is that it is now easier and far less hassle to either shop on the Internet or go to one of the big supermarkets, Tesco or Sainsbury’s, where parking is not a problem. We would all like to support our local shops but to face streets and car parks crammed with cars and not a space in sight is not a pleasant prospect and so many restrict their trips into town to emergencies only.

This is not a rosy picture for the place we have all chosen to call home but in the past fifty years during the reign of King Car the face of our traditional and picturesque market towns such as Bourne has been changed forever, the streets plastered with white and yellow lines and the pavements cluttered with a mass of signage that has altered their very character, all to accommodate the motorist, and the pace is now unstoppable.

It is a majority aspiration to own a motor car and with a burgeoning automotive industry and opportunist financial services those who want one are bound to get one. The possibility of a change in the current climate is unlikely and so the future is bleak and with the number of cars in Britain now soon reaching 30 million in a country with a population of around 50 million aged over 16 and therefore entitled to drive, figures that are increasing annually, the appearance of our streets a few decades hence is unimaginable.

Note: This article was published by the Bourne web site on 25th July 2015