Are cars practical for most journeys in the UK?

The car's case was won not by the young or the old but by the middle-aged, who carried this vote near-unanimously while everyone either side of them hedged. Once household, commute and school-run pressures bite in the 45-64 bracket, cars stop being a lifestyle choice and start looking indispensable, and the numbers here bear that out almost to the point of unanimity.

The one visible fracture sits with the 25-34s, who split down the middle even as every other age group broke decisively for yes, a generation caught between renting near transport links and needing a car once life gets more complicated. Men were also markedly more convinced than women, who divided far more evenly on the question, echoing wider survey findings that women's journeys are often shorter, more multi-stop and more transit-dependent than men's commuter runs.

The verdict lands where most of the evidence on British travel patterns already sits: outside the big cities, with patchy rural buses and trains, the car remains the default rather than the villain, congestion charges and net-zero pressure notwithstanding.

For all the talk of low-traffic neighbourhoods and modal shift, this chamber still thinks the car is doing the job it was bought for.