You can’t park again when you get back home; and when finally you do get lucky, you can only hope passing punks will leave your vehicle alone.
One possibility is not to own a car, use public transport and taxis, and rent when necessary. This does wonders for peace of mind, and the amount of money it saves is spectacular. But if you have a family, or live far from the city centre, it is probably not an option.However, in Europe, the US and, increasingly, in Britain, people are finding another solution. If you join a car club, you can have access to a vehicle when you need it, far more cheaply and conveniently than by renting, and without having to worry about the damn thing when you’re not actually using it.The way it works is simple. The club maintains a fleet of cars parked in bays around the city, ideally within a 10-minute walk of members’ homes or workplaces.
(City Car Club, the longest-established, has 22 cars in Edinburgh and 41 in London, and also operates in Brighton and Hove, and Bristol). Every member pays a monthly fee – £15, though introductory offers can be as low as £7. When you need a car you ring and book it, either in advance or, if you see it sitting there, on the spot. You pay an hourly charge – £2.80 for a small car, £3 for a larger one, to a maximum of £36 for 24 hours, plus a mileage charge of 17p or 18p which includes fuel.
City-based car owners find themselves in a bind. Not only does it take forever to get anywhere (emitting CO2 and other ghastly poisons as you go), but when you do get there, you can’t park. Now lighter sockets seem meant for charging mobile phones, and ashtrays are tinier than ever. Judge, then, my joy when a Lexus IS300 joined the family, and I discovered that with the gearlever in the usual D position, the hand has but to slide past it for the ashtray to be unerringly located.Too many car-makers seem to have joined the anti-smoking brigade, villains that they are.
One came to collect a test car for its makers (whose sticker merely offered “Thanks for not smoking”) and, noting that the ashtray had been used, wrote across the bottom of the discharge sheet: “Car been smoked in.” Handing me the carbon copy, he climbed in, lit up a grateful gasper, and drove contentedly away.. When a road-test car is delivered to me bearing a sign telling me not to smoke, I can only assume that there must be something wrong with the ventilation system, and I am obliged to mark the car down accordingly.It is refreshing to note, however, that there remain stalwarts for whom driving and smoking – two of the greatest pleasures known to man – are not to be separated. The only people to do it correctly were, as you might expect, Bristol, who set two ashtrays on top of the coaming above the dashboard, so the driver could reach and locate it without taking his eyes off the road. Rolls-Royce used to make the most magnificent ashtray, though they put it in the wrong place. Even worse was the placing in the Rover 3500, just in line with a ventilation nozzle on the dash: any attempt to discard the ash of a cigar or a cigarette was foiled by a blast of air that blew ash and embers all over the interior of the car. Certainly, there is no question of forbidding all other kinds of smoking: imagine buses, lorries, taxis and diesel cars being penalised for smoking, not to mention incense.Manufacturers used to take smoking seriously, as once we all did. It actually started when the famous newspaper boss William Randolph Hearst had a tiff with one of the Virginian tobacco barons, and ordered all his editors to contrive the wretched fellow’s downfall.The poor man is long dead, but the campaign against tobacco smoking has gathered too much momentum to be stopped, even though (as some medicos admit with embarrassment) it can in some respects be beneficial to health.
How can the inside of a private car be a public place?Well, BMW, most public-spirited of all makers of private cars, has offered an antidote – the non-smoking car. They volunteered to omit all ashtrays and lighters from the interior, without actually charging extra (such generosity). The hand-brake is heavy, though, and it is difficult to see out of the rear window if you’ve got three passengers on the back seat. This lead was not followed: lawyers suggested that it implied that the interior of a BMW thus took on the characteristics of a public place, which might lead to it being classed as a public service vehicle, inviting pedestrians to jump in and demand to be taken to a tobacconist.One has to assume that it is to tobacco that the current anti-smoking campaign is directed. Our Government, should it so long endure, is keen to make smoking illegal in public places. Our Ken is evidently anxious to do it even sooner in London, even if it be theoretically ultra vires – that is, Beyond Our Ken He seems to think he owns the place.
