Nicholas Craig Column

May 18 2007 By Nicholas Craig, The Journal

Professional people are becoming more mobile, travelling around the North-East, country and overseas as a matter of routine.

Fifty years ago we each travelled about five miles a day. Now it is over 30 miles a day, and forecast to double by 2025.

The downside of being able to travel anywhere fairly easily is that if we focus on time spent on contacts around the country we spend less with those closer to home - colleagues and family - and the more people we feel we need to contact regularly, the less time we have to devote to each one. I read an article about "hypermobile" societies in which the trend is to spend much more time on the move. Old fashioned geographical communities are being swapped for much wider networks across regions and countries because of our increasing use of cars.

If the trend towards hypermobility continues we will see suburbs sprawl even further, and extra roads, parking spaces and airports being built with unwelcome environmental consequences. Society will polarise more between those who are able to be mobile and those who cannot afford the cost of their own transport or the soaring cost of tickets for trains, boats and planes.

Although there has been a tenfold increase in the world's car population since 1950 to about 500 million, the number of people over this period who do not own cars has more than doubled - to about 5.5 billion - because of population growth.

Car addiction has even altered the way in which we bring up our children. Only 35 years ago 80% of seven-year-olds got to school on their own. Now virtually none do.

More traffic means that youngsters walking home have to dodge rush-hour drivers and "stranger danger". Chauffeured children lose out on the exercise and the freedom of walking to and from school, becoming less fit and less independent as a result.

If we want to reduce dependency on the car we should look less at city centre congestion and focus more on providing excellent public transport in the suburbs, while restricting the ease with which homeowners can have two, three or four cars parked at one house.

If we slow down the march of hypermobility we could speed up the spread of sustainable, friendly, healthy communities where children play in the street safely and we even get time to talk to our neighbours.