Universal Transportation - Transport for all, everywhere, all of the time in comfort and safety.

If you are tax payer, one that gets up every day and goes about your day, this will mean something to you. 

I want to put the right as an individual to move freely without a car. To walk outside their town or city without walking on a road next to 60mph HGV's and to catch a bus or a train without first taking out a small loan.

I've joined cycle campaigns not interested in public transport and seen many road safety campaigns not interested in cyclists, just pushing helmets and hi-viz. 

Technically a driving licence is a privilege but in practice it is seen as a right and Magistrates allow dangerous killers back behind the wheels of their cars because they couldn't get to work otherwise.

Every safe driver would benefit from having less tailgaters, speeders and drunk drivers to contend with.

This is not one single issue, this is about our right not to have drive, whether you can or not actually drive a car.

I live in East Anglia, in the Fens and I'm about to move my family to Holland. No small part of this is because I don't feel safe cycling with my kids in England and I love to ride every day. I fear for the health and safety of anyone in the UK to wants to move around - dammed if you do or don't.

Europe is a crowded place, it is impossible for every individual to own and drive a car, there simply isn't room. Yet it is becoming increasingly difficult to move about without a car. 

Public transport in the UK is expensive, unreliable and in the case of travelling late at night - without the presence of guards on trains also potentially very dangerous.

Inactivity is causing a whole raft of problems, both our physical and mental health is being failed by a system that favours making short journeys dangerous and unpleasant by any other means of transportation. 20-40 minutes of light exercise a day would cure many of the diseases suffered and that could be a walk or a bike ride to work, school, the railway station.

Road deaths are coming down - mainly due to the motor industry responding with measures that protect the people inside cars like ABS, airbags, crumple zones. Only a small proportion of car design focusses on what happens when a car hits a human being. There is no comfortable gear you can do 15-20mph. Modern cars have more blind spots as they respond to the strength needed to survive a crash at 70mph. Cars and people don't belong in the same space once on the move.

Roads outside towns frequently don't have any place to walk or cycle away from vehicles travelling at speeds where it is dangerous and frightening to not be in a vehicle. In our victim blaming culture, if you are hit by a vehicle, it was your fault for not being visible enough or even just for being there in the first place.

Safety campaigns focus on helmet use by the victims, hi-viz vests, lighting up the vulnerable user rather than expecting the dangerous fast moving object to be controlled by someone looking where they are going and behaving with any responsibility to other users.

When we walk across the road, we bow in front of drivers and thank them for not killing us and our children.

Good drivers are abundant but they also fall victim to bad and dangerous drivers - whole families wiped out in one journey by someone in a hurry or who has chosen to drive drugged or drunk. Safe drivers need more protection from dangerous drivers. There needs to simply be the choice of becoming a good driver or not to drive at all.

Young people, people under the legal age to drive but who are otherwise independent are at the mercy of those who can drive - cycling to school or to football practice is too dangerous without segregation from motorised vehicles or the trust that those behind the wheel are not going to leave your child for dead in a ditch, fear is the dominating factor forcing parents to turn into a taxi service.

Otherwise fit and able paraplegics who in the Netherlands are fully independent thanks to the segregated cycle network with hand cycles are confined to when and where a driver can take them.

Legislation throughout Europe should ensure that the following would be expected of transport and infrastructure departments as well as Justice departments. Some countries are better than others, but even looking at the EU projects already in play, it's all very very car centric. We need laws that:

1) That every individual can use the public highway to get from A to B segregated from motor traffic.

2) That every road have a section no narrower than 1.5m wide and preferably up to 3m wide that is smooth and maintained and shall be exclusively for the use of non-motorised traffic*.

3) That all side roads and junctions either give non - motorised traffic right of way or that there is a crossing or bridge/underpass provided.

4) Make non-motorised transport the primary user (again, it is in theory in some areas but not in practice); 

• Roads are firstly designed for use by non-motorised traffic and if there is room thereafter, motorised traffic can have access but dependent on the proximity to other users and with strict restrictions on speed and behaviour - they are the guests, not the primary users. 
• Roads where vehicle speeds exceed 20mph should be designed to keep other users at a safe and pleasant distance.

5) That local authorities be expected to provide public transport that is regular, reliable, high quality, affordable and accessible for all between the hours of 6am - Midnight 7 days a week. In cities this should be available 24 hours a day. The highest proportion of people should be able to get to work or school without the need to drive. 

6) The motorised transport that is in use is properly controlled - the licence agreement must be adhered to, insurance and tax properly paid, breaches of all agreements result in loss of licence with the only way to get a new licence being to re-take the test. Penalties for driving without need to be far harsher - based on the fact that you are effectively in charge of a lethal weapon without any training. Technology such as black boxes can be used to ensure repeat offenders cannot re-offend without facing the consequences.

7) Dramatic reduction on the number of road deaths to only deaths that could not be prevented by any of the other measures here.

8) Driving should no longer be seen as a right by the justice system (let's face it, it is at the moment, whatever they say).

• Driving is a privilege and that the responsibility to other users and passengers be considered foremost in deciding if someone is fit to drive a motorised vehicle. 
• Enough alternatives to vehicle ownership should exist so that the 'need' to drive be completely removed from the equation.

If these measures were implemented, it would reduce the burden on the tax payer to pay for an over burdened, expensive justice system, health care system and relieve the pressure on our roads from congestion caused by queues of cars designed to carry 5 people with one person in them. We currently pay for all the bad stuff - the magistrates courts, the police, the Ambulances, the A&E and trauma units, we subsidise a rail network that makes more profit than ever yet there's been no serious increase in infrastructure for over a generation. We pay for this rather than a high quality public transport and road network fit for all users, not just motorised users.

We need to re-claim the right NOT to drive a car, and it needs to be written into our laws and implemented locally and nationally.

*Non-motorised traffic = pedestrians, wheel chair users, mobility scooters, cyclists - any form of transport that does not have a motor or that if powered can not travel faster than 15mph. There is no speed restriction providing the speed has been powered by human power.