What measures can governments take to discourage people from using their cars?

By no means cars revolutionized our lives, giving us freedom and making the world smaller. But

this

revolution has a dark side which is excessive

traffic

congestion, among others, in cities. It’s fair to say that the average speed on the streets of London nowadays is comparable to the one in the 1920’s. Definitely roads of our cities became nothing more than one bit

traffic

jam. In

this

essay I would like to analyse how governments can tackle

this

problem, what means can be used to unclog our towns and how to discourage citizens from using their vehicles. Just for the sake of honesty, I believe that the majority of local authorities are aware of

such

a problem and already started implementing reasonable solutions. One of the main incentives of using motor vehicles in cities is that these are faster, more comfortable and allow the public to reach their travel destinations quicker. If someone can cut half an hour from his daily

commute he

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commute, he

would definitely

choose faster

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choose a faster

means of transport. If we want to encourage drivers to switch to public

transportation we

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transportation, we

need to ensure that

this

one will provide shorter travel times, become more comfortable and more reliable.

This

can be done by a myriad of ways. Some of them require large investments - like building new entire rapid transit systems, other ones are way cheaper - establishing bus lanes on the most congested roads, or even

such

simple as introducing wireless internet and power sockets in commuter trains, so that office workers can productively use the time spent

in

Suggestion

on

the journey. Addressing problem from the other side, side local governments can try to discourage motorists from using cars. One may come with many ideas how

this

can be exercised. I would just like to mention introducing charges for driving

into

Suggestion

in

city centres, increasing parking charges or maybe even making them more dynamic,

dependent

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depending

on current

traffic

in the city. One idea that could be taken into account is to transform municipal infrastructure so that it forces the

traffic

to be limited. It might be slightly counterintuitive that,

for example

, making roads narrower would reduce the

traffic

. But

this

is what recent research suggests. Changes making it more difficult to use the car should,

however

, be done considerably. There are many people whose trade

makes

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make

it necessary to use care in everyday work.

This

includes builders, decorators, delivery drivers and more. We need to make sure that new regulations won’t make them worse off. To summarise, we definitely see that increasing motor

traffic

affects our everyday life and congestion caused by cars cannot be solved by simply building more roads. Governments,

however

, have plenty of ways to resolve

this

issue, and some already started.