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I suddenly realised that it is a full 3 years since I sold my car. Living 20 minutes’ walk from the city centre, working from home (and the rise of Zoom/Teams) and being within walking distance of the kids’ school, my car use had plummeted to the extent my only regular use was to take one child to football twice a week.

I had bought a Tern GSD cargo bike a year before, which covered the football (until the player retired from competitive sport) and was suitable for a medium-sized supermarket shop, and the ‘big shop’ gets delivered to our door – I haven’t bought a fridge or a wardrobe in that time, so all the reply guys on social media can sleep easy. This pretty much made the car redundant so we sold it and joined the Cowheels car club for the few times a month that I visit a client on site or go for a family walk in the countryside.

As well as the money drain of having a car sitting doing nothing at the kerb day in, day out, this also acted as an experiment for different ways of living/consuming. The cargo bike is much more fun than a car for buzzing about the city and you can often dodge large queues of traffic and, while expensive for a bike, cost about 10% of the outlay for an EV. The car club works well most of the time and is a nice example of a ‘product-service system’ – I’m buying a transport service rather than a car. The pay-as-you-go nature of the club also makes public transport more competitive as there are no sunk costs.

Perfect? I have two qualms. The minor one is that a (small) element of our prior car use is covered by other kind car owners – “Oh, don’t worry, we’ll give you a lift” – which it would be churlish to refuse on principle, but to be honest we don’t reciprocate as much as we should.

The bigger issue is that our standard holiday is to book a cottage in the country for a week or two. The car club isn’t really designed for multi-day use and standard car hire is weirdly bureaucratic (I’ve had to get a credit card just for this) and expensive – you feel you need to use it more than the journey at each end of the holiday which kind of spoils the whole point of the exercise! We occasionally experiment with public transport, walking and/or cycling, but some rural transport is appalling. On one recent weekend away with the Prof, we looked into buses but, after a bit of head-scratching, the penny to dropped that the bus only ran on a Saturday, which might as well be ‘never’ as far as we were concerned.

A change in mindset helps. Our last weekend away on Kerrera, an inner-Hebridean island, required a bus, three trains, a 2 mile forest walk carrying all our food, and then a ferry. The journey was definitely part of the holiday – the West Highland line is always a treat I will never tire of, eating an M&S lunch.

Looking forward, car ownership is falling amongst younger generations and they are getting out of the mindset of ownership of anything. Will we start to see a resurgence of public transport to match? Or other business models like a regular customer version of car hire which doesn’t require your inner-leg measurement and mother’s birth certificate each time you want to go away for a bit? But I can’t see me owning a car ever again.