Cutting down on your Car use，helping Solve the Energy Crisis
Sep
17
Some of the best methods you can adopt to reduce your car use are:
- Leaving your car at home for a day: Use your car to drive to work only four times a week rather than every day of the week – walk, cycle, or use public transport on the fifth day.
- Sharing your journey: How often do you drive somewhere alone and see hundreds of other drivers going in the same direction as you – also alone? Reduce the amount of time you drive alone by organising to drive with a workmate or to take neighbours’ children to and from school.
- Freeing up some space in the garage: Sell the second family car and organise to share the remaining car with other family members.
Especially, get rid of the SUV (Sports Utility Vehicle), 4×4, or four-wheel drive. Whatever you call it, unless you live in the middle of nowhere, you’re very unlikely ever to use it as it was meant to be used, and it uses far more fuel than you need for your urban journeys.
- Telecommuting: More flexible working arrangements mean you may be able to work from home by accessing your work network via the Internet. Ask your employer if you can telecommute, or telework, from home one day a week.
- Planning your travel: Consolidate your errands into one big trip rather than making lots of smaller trips. For example, combine your shopping trip with the school run.
Adopting some of these tips greatly reduces the number of cars on the roads and the miles clocked up.
When you use your car, drive as greenly as possible by keeping your car fully serviced and make sure that the tire pressures are as specified in your handbook – otherwise you use more fuel than necessary. Under-inflated tires can increase your fuel consumption by as much as 3%. And remember that speed not only kills, it uses more fuel, as does keeping the engine running when you’re not moving and revving it at the traffic lights!
The charity Carplus promotes more responsible use of cars. The government also has a ‘Smarter Choices’ campaign which promotes everything from car-sharing and the use of public transport, to school, workplace, and individual travel plans that involve less car use.
In cities across the globe, driving a car is a typical person’s most air-polluting activity.
One of the greatest benefits of reducing car use is the decreased demand for mining and using fossil fuels. Some commentators argue that fossil fuel reserves have already peaked and we are now using the second half of remaining stores.
The current high fuel prices indicate that supply is not what it used to be; you only need your simple primary school economics to work that out. What you can now be sure of is that oil and gas, like most things that are sourced from the earth, are finite resources that need to be managed much more effectively before they run out.
Given that most of the fossil-generated oil and gas is used by the transport industry, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out that reducing use of cars also reduces the need for oil and petrol, thereby decreasing the pressure on ever-dwindling reserves.
Cars that use alternatives to petrol and diesel offer some energy relief, but alternative fuel cars alone can’t provide the whole answer for drivers. And, rather than wait for more efficient versions of these cars to be developed, by which time oil and gas reserves may have dwindled even further, environmentalists agree that throttling the addiction to the use of motor vehicles is the way to go. A key part of reducing car usage is to make sure that there are more sustainable transport choices on offer for people and to provide incentives for people to use them.
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