People in England made 841 trips each in 2025, about 16 a week, and travelled roughly 9,020 km (5,605 miles), spending 342 hours on the move — around 56 minutes a day (the Department for Transport's National Travel Survey 2025). Most of those trips are not a statement of values; they are a shift time, a school gate, a pharmacy that shuts at six. Map the requirement behind each one before anybody is asked to travel differently, and the argument about motivation mostly disappears.

Start from the purpose, not the mode

Write "collect a child by 17:00" or "be on the ward before the shift starts", never "car trip". Then list the conditions that cannot currently move: the time, the destination, the assistance needed, the thing carried, the return, the cost ceiling.

Each person lists only their own trips. Guessing which of someone else's journeys are optional is where these conversations go wrong, and it is also where they become unwinnable. If the sheet will be shared, keep destinations general — "a weekly appointment" rather than an address.

What an average week actually contains

The survey breaks the year down by purpose, and the shape is worth seeing before anyone proposes a change (the trips by purpose tables).

Scroll sideways to see the full table →

Purpose, England 2025Trips per personDistance per person
Shopping145about 903 km (561 miles)
Commuting112about 1,659 km (1,031 miles)
Just walk79about 129 km (80 miles)

Shopping and commuting together are 257 of the 841 trips, just over 30% of the year, and commuting alone carries the longest average distance. The same tables record that shopping trips fell 13% between 2024 and 2025 while commuting stayed level at 112 against 111 (trips by purpose) — a reminder that the two categories move for different reasons and do not respond to the same kind of nudge.

The constraint that belongs to someone else

Sort every trip into three columns: what could change with the options you already have, what would need another person or organisation to move first, and what you do not yet know. A missing last bus, a station with no lift, a shift pattern set by an employer and a lease that forbids a bike in the hallway all belong in the middle column, and nothing on your sheet will shift them.

Do not label a condition fixed simply because nobody has asked. Equally, do not decide a requirement is flexible because that would make your preferred answer work. Both are guesses dressed as conclusions; mark them as questions with a name attached — the employer, the operator, the school, the council.

A worked map of one week

As an example, use the survey's own averages as the baseline (National Travel Survey 2025). Commuting at 112 trips a year is 112 ÷ 52 = 2.2 trips a week, and the survey puts the average car driver trip at 22 minutes, so a typical commuting day out and back is about 44 minutes behind the wheel. Shopping at 145 trips a year is 145 ÷ 52 = 2.8 trips a week over a much shorter average distance: 903 km across 145 trips is about 6.2 km a trip, against 1,659 km across 112 commuting trips, or about 14.8 km each.

That arithmetic tells two people something a mode ranking cannot. The short, frequent, local trips are the ones where an alternative might already exist; the long ones are set by where somebody works. Put your own week's figures in place of the averages and the same split appears, usually with one surprise in it.

Two next steps that are not the same step

Finish with exactly two decisions, and keep them apart.

The first is a trial you control: one journey with a plausible alternative, tested once, door to door — the method in comparing one everyday journey, and if the alternative is a train neither of you has used lately, a rehearsed trip by public transport.

The second is a question for whoever controls the constraint: the timetable, the shift rota, the entrance. Progress there looks different — it may simply be finding out which organisation decides. When the answer is a local authority, turn it into a council question rather than a complaint.

The European picture explains why the second column is usually the crowded one. The EEA's 2025 assessment of Europe's mobility systems puts passenger cars at around 72% of transport activity in passenger-kilometres and finds that public transport's share of total passenger transport has changed very little, even as car use grew (the EEA report). A map of constraints is not a moral ranking of the people who made those trips. It is a way of seeing which choices exist, which need somebody else, and which question is worth asking next.

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