[ta1243]

The average car in the netherlands is driven about 8000 miles a year.

Doesn't matter how good the public transport is, it can not sustain a journey from my small village to a larger village at 10pm at night on a friday night. Nor will it meet me at 2350 from the railhead in a city a 30 minute drive away. On the way back from that station at that time of night I pass maybe 2 or 3 cars, none of which came from or go to anywhere near my house.

Even if there was some form of ondemand public transport, the carbon impact would be far more than my own car.

The reason I don't travel 40,000 miles a year by car is because I use other forms of public transport when I can. However even with 90% of my domestic (by mile) being public transport, I still need a car for the last 10%. The tax system in the UK punishes that behaviour (I pay far more in tax per litre of petrol used than my neighbour who drives everywhere), it's either all-or-nothing.

[rwmj]

> The average car in the netherlands is driven about 8000 miles a year.

Could be (I don't know) because all the people living next to bike lanes and with good public transport have given up their cars, so the only car users left are the ones who really need to drive a lot, raising the average.

[eigenspace]

It's the opposite actually. Car ownership in the netherlands is actually rather high because it's a relatively rich country where people can easily afford to own a car for the occasional convenience.

The fact that there's great public transport there makes it so that those cars don't get driven as much for day-to-day errands as cars do in other places, so they have overall less driving. 8000 miles a year is relatively low.

[ta1243]

The netherlands has 520 passenger cars per 1000 people. The UK 544. Not exactly a world of difference.

https://www.acea.auto/files/ACEA-report-vehicles-in-use-euro...

[eigenspace]

Yes, you may very well be in a situation where car ownership makes perfect sense for you. I guess my perspective (being originally from rural Canada) is that 5-10k miles a year is very low, and I equate that with city drivers, not rural drivers. Where I grew up, most people often do 400km day trips to the nearest city multiple times a month, in addition to regular day-to-day driving.

Rural England is a pretty different beast from rural Canada though, and also pretty different dynamics from urban Germany where I currently live.

People in your situation unfortunately probably won't benefit from electric cars for some time, because the tax incentives are generally being decreased, not increased, so we're going to have to count on competition lowering prices instead, which seems to be happening, but relatively slowly.