Why am I writing about cars and safety? As an author of historical fiction, I tend to mainly post about history and writing. However, before I retired and began writing the Sir Anthony Standen Adventures, I was a civil engineer, project manager, and risk manager. So I occasionally write posts about matters from my past life. I read a worrying article in the Sunday Times today about the recent fire in the Luton Airport multi-storey car park. Among many contributing factors I’ll focus on a few.
Cars are wider than they used to be. The top twenty best selling cars are on average 17% wider than they were in 1998. The parking bays aren’t any wider, which means that the cars are closer together and fire is able to spread more easily from car to car.
The car park at Luton Airport was built in 2019, had no fire sprinklers, and was constructed from uncoated steel, which softens at 500 degrees centigrade. I’ve posted in the past about the Grenfell Tower, disaster, and the shortcomings in the regulatory environment which may have contributed to it.
I won’t repeat the whole Sunday Times article, but I just want to raise a few similar points. Cars are so much wider, including mine. As with parking bays, country lanes aren’t any wider either. It’s a problem. Why are our cars so much wider? Every tractor I see on the roads now seems to have been designed and manufactured for American roads, not English country lanes.
Electric Vehicles are considerably heavier than their petrol and diesel counterparts, because of the weight of the batteries. We need to make the switch to protect our climate, but we also need to upgrade all the infrastructure to cope, not just charging points.
Personally I yearn for the day when I don’t need a car at all. I’m thinking of TAAS, (Transport As A Service) in which you can summon a robotically driven vehicle by app to make your journey. After all, what percentage of the time are our cars actually conveying us somewhere?