Like most people my day usually starts with a similar pattern.
I wake up and turn off my alarm. Soon after this I am usually checking the news for any breaking stories and by this I of course mean checking twitter.
When scrolling through my notifications, aside from those calling me names, there is generally a fairly common theme - and it is people complaining and sharing pictures of shocking parking and driving around Merseyside.
These are issues I have been writing about for the entirety of my six-year Liverpool ECHO career and it feels like things are only getting worse. Every week people take to social media to publish increasingly outrageous images of vehicles parked wildly over pavements or drivers behaving in a way that endangers pedestrians and cyclists.
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There is only one conclusion we can really draw from all this - Merseyside is car sick.
Now full disclosure at this stage, I own a car - in fact I recently had to purchase a new one because I have quite a large dog and a small child on the way. My wife and I would have loved to buy an electric car or even a hybrid but sadly at this stage those options are still too far out of our budget.
I do, however, try to use my car as little as possible. I use public transport to get to work every day and to get anywhere else I feasibly can. Sadly as anyone who uses public transport in the north knows, this is not always easy.
I travelled to London last week for a couple of days. As I was on my way down I was back on twitter (yes, this is a recurring theme) and came across the regular tweets from people desperately trying to make the simple journey between Liverpool and Manchester.
One bereft traveller commented that at 7.30am in Liverpool, there was not a single train running that would get him to Manchester in time to start his job at 9am. Remarkably, one of the responses was 'you could always get a coach.'
Another commenter added that they had recently moved to Liverpool and after being so appalled and frustrated by the unreliable services to get them to work in Manchester, they had started travelling in by car. This is someone who actively wants to use public transport who has been forced back into a car by the shocking state of our public transport.
Now I am generally supportive of the Merseyrail network. I usually find it reliable and decent to use to get around the region. However one big reason for this is that unlike hundreds of thousands of people, I live very close to a station on the network.
For too many people the option of using the region's rail network is just out of reach and unrealistic. Large parts of the east of Liverpool for example, or big chunks of the Wirral are completely cut off from the Merseyrail network and so have to either rely on a fragmented and expensive bus system or - as is often the case - end up back in their cars.
We now have new state-of-the-art Merseyrail trains slowly entering the network after seemingly endless delays only to be met with early faults and further hold ups. Granted these are hopefully just teething issues but it is just another moment of frustration for those of us in this part of the world who want a future with fewer cars on the roads.
Having been in London this week and experienced the remarkable service that is the London Underground, where trains to each and every part of the city arrive within minutes - for a heavily subsidised price - I was left with a familiar feeling of being short changed. I marvelled at the expressions of disgust etched on the faces of Londoners being told that they would have to wait a whole four minutes for their next service.
My wider point here is that it is impossible to analyse and criticise Merseyside's undoubtedly car-led culture without looking at where it comes from. If the alternative options are not practical or affordable then people will not make those all important lifestyle changes. It won't happen without it.
Now don't get me wrong, there is important work taking place to improve things. Steve Rotheram's plans to bring the region's buses back into public control - giving the region powers over fares, routes and services - is an undoubtedly positive step that should bring real accountability to a system that has been a profit-driven free-for-all since the disastrous deregulation decision in the 1980s.
And there is work taking place to improve Merseyrail too. It is hoped that battery technology will allow trains to run to more places, while steps are also being taken to create a modern payment method that will allow passengers to tap debit and Metro cards and avoid long rush hour queues at stations of a morning.
All this should help to entice more people out of their motor vehicles and onto public transport, but it all still feels frustratingly far away.
A region that remains in thrall to the motor car has obvious negative impacts. Around 1,000 deaths every year in the Liverpool City Region can be linked to our toxic air pollution. In 2018, the city was named alongside Manchester and London in a list of 40 UK towns and cities that were at or had exceeded air pollution levels set by the World Health Organization.
And there are similarly grim statistics when it comes to the dangers faced by cyclists on the region's roads. Between 2014 and 2018 Liverpool recorded the highest number of cyclists killed or seriously injured on its roads of any metropolitan boroughs in the country.
If you head back to twitter on any given day you will see cyclists from our city and our region complaining about near-misses they have faced with motor vehicles on the roads. While some work has been done to provide better and safer cycling infrastructure in recent years it is still evident that the network is still very fragmented and way behind other equivalent cities like Manchester.
Perhaps Liverpool's specific issues with cars were most perfectly summed up during last year's disastrous car-free day, which had to be abandoned early as chaos and gridlock gripped the roads of the city centre. It was an apposite portrayal of just how far we have to go.
I would hope that most of us would like to live in a region where our children are not being made ill by toxic exhaust fumes, where people feel safe heading out on their bikes and where disabled people and parents with prams can make it down the street without having to lurch into the road to navigate around a car that has been thrust selfishly across the pavement.
Behaviour change is hard, but it starts with providing better alternative options and while that work is ongoing, it needs to hurry up for all our sakes.
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