The previous day, deputy Prime Minister John Prescott had unveiled ambitious and complex plans to reduce the number of cars on the road, and increase the number of journeys by public transport.

	More than a decade later the green panniers, yellow helmet and crotch-hugging lycra shorts lie mouldering in a box under the stairs.	I am one of John Prescott's problems. Until I was 30 I rode a bike to work. And then I bought myself a steel grey Ford Escort, and I never got on the bike again. More than a decade later the green panniers, yellow helmet and crotch-hugging lycra shorts lie mouldering in a box under the stairs. The Raleigh Classic itself is long-gone, but outside, by the public pavement, stands one of my family's two cars. In two senses only, subsequent events have vindicated this choice. Only last month it was revealed how much damage can be done to the perineum by an over-hard and over-thin saddle. And I am still - unlike many fellow city cyclists - in one piece, having got out before a lorry could turn left across me, or a white van could shunt me into a bollard. But in every other way this decision has been a bad one. I am fatter, uglier, more stressed and much less fit as a result of it. But why exactly, is increased car use by people like me socially intolerable? The world still turns on its (slightly warmer) axis, and if we do sit in bad traffic jams twice a day, well at least we can get the week's shopping on the way home - something our parents had to set aside half a day to accomplish. OK then. If you live or work in a city or town, get up and look outside your window. You can't see anything? Now mentally subtract, say, two thirds of the cars and vans from the scene in front of you. See how wide the street, freed from parked vehicles, has suddenly become, restored to the dimensions that were originally designed for it. Look how everything is opened up, now that you do not peer at it over an unbroken fence of chrome and metal. The traffic, too, has been reduced by two thirds. Perhaps you could imagine riding a bike again in circumstances like these. If you are a parent you will be aware of how much easier it is for your kids to cross the road, or go roller-blading, or play football in the street, or even walk to the local school. And sniff the air for a moment, with the amount of diesel particulates, sulphur dioxide and carbon monoxide now significantly reduced.
	It's Gary Sneed, his seat belt securely fastened, driving his battered GTi at 30 mph down a tiny back street, completely unable to see (let alone stop for) any small child that might have the temerity to cross his path.	That was all a dream. The reality is Hetty Hatstand, the engine left running on her double-parked, bull-barred Range Rover, as she delivers Dominic to St Dunstan's Academy for the Rich. It's 22-year-old Gary Sneed, his seat belt securely fastened, driving his battered GTi at 30 mph down a tiny back street, completely unable to see (let alone stop for) any small child that might have the temerity to cross his path. It's Ed and his Quality Builders in a 10-year-old Transit, chucking tangible black fumes like poisonous stink-bombs at everyone on his snail-paced route from the house he's doing up, down to the cafe on the High Street, where he will park in a bus lane while he buys two teas and a bacon sarnie. The reality is a generation of children who only leave their houses by car, and who are imprisoned in their own homes - not by paedophiles or mass murderers, but by Gary, Hetty, Ed and me. So we must act, and the government is acting. But we must not, of course, do so by "penalising" the motorist. The AA (of which I am a member) and the RAC are apprised, they say, of the need to have a more rational transport policy. It should be one, they argue, that gently encourages car-owners to make some of their journeys by foot, bicycle or public transport, but that does not coerce them. First put in place a massively improved bus and train network, they say, and we would be the first to welcome it. We'd be out of our Vauxhall Viagras and onto the trams in a two shakes of a lamb's tail. I can't remember who first said to me that the AA was Britain's equivalent of America's National Rifle Association, but they weren't far wrong. For the AA knows full well that the public transport improvements that they demand as a precondition for action against cars, are a chimera. Or, to put it more simply, it is just not true that we use our cars because public transport isn't good enough. That just happens to be our excuse. It's like those people who use private schooling for their under-11s on the basis that the local schools are dreadful - and then you discover that they haven't so much as set foot in one.
	The AA is Britain's equivalent of America's National Rifle Association	The evidence, which we are reluctant to accept, is that even substantially enhanced public transport reduces car use only marginally. The much vaunted (and beautiful) Manchester tram system, for instance, has hardly touched car journeys into and through the city, despite huge expenditure. Ignoring congestion, people remain obstinately attached to their cars. In part this is explicable in terms of freedom from the elbows, smells, threatening proximity and Walkmans of other public transport users. But economics and convenience play a big part too. Once you have bought a car, taxed it, MOT'ed it, cleaned it, and bought Supertramp tapes for it, almost any other form of transport is likely to be just as, if not more, expensive. Furthermore you will not have to wait to board your own car, nor will it drop you 400 yards from your house on a stinking day in late January. One answer to this problem would be to make it far more expensive just to own or run a car. Road tax could be raised to genuinely prohibitive levels (say, a grand a year), fuel tax could be quadrupled, and the cars themselves made hugely more expensive to buy - as in Singapore. The trouble is that this approach, while tempting, is genuinely inequitable. It impacts too harshly upon the poor and the rural. What catches the rich and poor equally, while targeting the areas where life really is destroyed by the car, is simple old-fashioned coercion. Coercion means streets closed to private traffic, parking restricted to all except residents, two lanes of a three lane road reserved for buses and bikes, leaving only one for other traffic, instant fines for driving at over 15 mph on back streets. It means £100 on-the-spot fines for illegal parking and driving in bus lanes. Coercion works, too, because quite a lot of traffic "vanishes". When, at the height of the IRA bombing offensive, the "ring of steel" was placed around the City of London, the delays and inconvenience led to a substantial drop in traffic, which was not displaced, but disappeared. When Kew Bridge in south-west London was closed to cars, there was no increase in the vicinity, but there was, once more, a foot and cycle bridge over the Thames.
	It will be the nasty little acts of coercion that will get us out of our motors.	It may be that, politically, such necessarily vicious measures have to be accompanied by reams of pieties, and loads of cooked-up statistics on public transport investment. And, certainly, this is one area where hypothecation may actually work, recycling the dosh from fines and parking charges into cycle lanes and lollipop ladies and gentlemen. But it will be the nasty little acts of coercion that will get us out of our motors. Repeat such acts a thousand times over (which Mr Prescott's White Paper will allow local authorities to do) and I would, I promise, get down to the bike shop and see if Raleigh still makes the Classic. And I also promise that I won't wear the lycra shorts.