When I got back to West Cumbria after my experience of traffic in London I thought thank God I don't have to do that on a regular basis. I was in London for a funeral and at one point it took me three hours to travel 10 miles and wherever we looked the roads were blocked and this was on a normal day. Back at home and wandering down to my road end at the A595 I watched my own mini London jam as Sellafield traffic ground to its daily halt between 4 and 5 p.m. In fact we can see our own mini London jams everyday in West Cumbria and they exist for exactly the same reason; too many cars and not enough space on the road. As parking becomes steadily more difficult especially in Whitehaven we can only hope that changing our habits will make our towns and villages easier to live in. But what will it take to make us end our love affair with cars.

I suppose the easy one to crack would be travel to work. Theoretically it would be possible now just as it used to be and we would only need to walk down to our nearest bus stop to take the bus to work. Would it be really so difficult for us to go back to that? Instead of spending our time slipping the clutch and raising our blood pressure we could instead be reading the paper, leafing through a magazine or simply relaxing to our favourite music. The key of course would be to ensure that there were sufficient buses, that they were comfortable enough and that we didn't have to feel like sardines when we travelled in them. It should even be an opportunity for users to dictate the level of comfort in a bus; how about individual connections to half a dozen radio stations just like Richard Branson's latest trains. I’m sure this is do-able and with support from employers and bus companies should be a no-brainer.

Now shopping strikes me as a much more difficult thing to change. We usually have very full trolleys when we leave our supermarkets and dragging the contents onto a bus doesn't strike me as a sensible alternative. This is where it'll require some really off the wall and innovative thinking if we are to get out of the habit of emptying vast quantities of food for our families into the boots of our cars. People without cars of course do take buses but then they are restricted by how much they can take. Some take large amounts of their weekly shop in the boot of a taxi but if we all did that would we be any better off as far as traffic congestion is concerned? Perhaps in an ideal world we could Internet shop or phone our order in and perfect fruit and vegetables and anything else that we wanted would be in stock and brought to our doors by our friendly neighbourhood delivery van at the same time as carrying the shopping of another 50 or a hundred people. The result would be emptier roads, empty supermarkets and many more hours to spend doing what we want with our families without the stress of a family "outing" to our favourite shop. Well if that sounds like too far in the future to you why not a park-and-ride on the edges of our towns with specially designed buses to take the trolleys once we have done our shop, once again leaving our pedestrianised towns free for us to stroll through and enjoy.

In the end to free up motorways and towns something has got to give, but given the opportunity to indulge ourselves in a bit of driving masochism we'll always go for it. So our lords and masters will have to ensure that travelling by bus and rail is a pleasant affordable experience that will persuade us to stop beating ourselves up while having a love affair with our cars.