£12.50 to drive your car - ULEZ coming to Stroud Green

Papa

Have an older car and need to go somewhere, drop the kids at school so you can go to work, drive a relative to hospital, do anything else, that'll be £12.50 in a few year's time.

Sadiq has confirmed ULEZ all the way out to North and South Circular from 2021 - with no resident discounts.

This is an area that involves a huge amount of residents, completely wrong in my view and deeply regressive.
Hits ordinary London families the hardest.

The no resident discount bit is the worst.

http://content.tfl.gov.uk/ulez-boundary-map-from-25-october-2021.pdf

HolbornFox

What happens if you live inside the boundary?

Papa

You get no discount, use your car at any time of any day of the week and it isn't new enough and you pay £12.50.

Nice, hey.

Arkady

What alternative solution would you propose to the literally criminal amount of life-limiting air pollution in London? Genuine question.

HolbornFox

Transport for London confirmed that residents will not receive a discount on the charge and have to pay the full fee every day they use their vehicle from the 2021 deadline.

Wowser.

dion

Isn't it only for diesel vehicles?

HolbornFox

@Arkady I got rid of my motor a few years ago and was using zip cars.

Needless to say there are hidden costs and it starts to work out not in your favour, so my solution would be a truly affordable sharing scheme.

rikki

more public transport, better car sharing for any truly essential car journeys, more cargo bikes, cycle infrastructure, better health, better planet, cities for people not cars.
welcome to the 21st century - only 21 years late!

rikki

actually, reading the small print, it's only VERY old petrol cars, older diesel cars, diesel HGVs etc, and worse still, black cabs are EXEMPT.

utterly pathetic.

so a few more thousand people will continue to die horribly in our city every year thanks to air pollution, our kids lungs will go on being weakened, and we'll continue to hurtle to irreversible climate change and extinction.

conformable_kate

How will they monitor it? It seems to imply some pretty intensive surveillance.

grenners

Sadiq is all talk. His pedestrianisation of Oxford Street has fallen through. He will be gone before long. He is defecting away from the fact he cannot deal with knifes, moped robberies and attacks on 90 year old helpless ladies.

grenners

...deflecting....

rikki

i'm no fan of sadiq khan, but i'm really not sure that knives, moped robberies and helpless aged can be blamed on the mayor - surely they are down to central government idealogical cuts aren't they?

joust

It needs to be done. The air is filthy here.
It won't effect many of the cars here anyway. Mine is 15 years old and isn't polluting enough.
If anything they should be more strict.

Brodiej

I’d accept anything if they bought the cars off me that they told me to buy which they’ve now decided are bad. They will need to ban smoking, all bbqs, all kebab shops. Tandoor ovens too.I appreciate the ultimate need to change but I resent being pushed, they should acknowledge their error, make good, and we all move on.

grenners

I have a 2012 diesel which has very low C02 emissions and therefore still falls within the lowest band for road tax at £40 per year as this tax is still weighted on CO2 emissions. I got it brand new as a company car at the time and I was heavily influenced by the low company car tax I would have to pay from my salary which was based on the low emissions. It's not a company car now I bought it off my old firm and its got years left to run. I have read that this plan will affect all diesels which are of a certain age on the implimentation date which would affect my vehicle.

Ali

The facts are here
https://tfl.gov.uk/modes/driving/ultra-low-emission-zone#on-this-page-1

Use the rego checker and you can see how your impacted.

It comes in for the current congestion zone April next year. If you have a foreign rego and haven't registered it with the scheme it will be £200 a day. If you are out driving just before midnight then just after midnight it is two days charges
This has been fully consulted on last year.

It will be interesting how this is policed as it will be lot's of cameras although we are used to that around here as we have 18 of them beamed on us at Tesco's checkouts. Remember to smile !

grenners

I'm obviously delighted that the government said my car was clean and incentised me to buy it and then does an about turn and says it's dirty. I can't quite work out why as they knew everything all along anyway regarding particulates in diesels. Anyway I work hard and save money and Sadiq just cost me thousands as I now have a car noone will buy. I need to get rid of it. I guess there is a market for it out of London. I can't quite believe it to be honest. I'll buy a petrol and in 5 years they will say we will charge you every day unless you get a hybrid and so on.

trainspotter

I'm in the same boat Grenners. Bought my car precisely because of it's supposed eco credentials and low tax but now it turns out to be a cancer vector. But I have 2 young kids growing up in dangerous air and that's more important, frankly. We have three years, anyway. If residents got a discount, it would wholly defeat the purpose of the measure.

Ali

Just been out on the bike around Evershot At. Saw quite a few electrical charging points being installed.

I guess there will be an election which this will no.doubt will be an issue.

grenners

It's not really very practical. I would have to run an extension lead out of my upstairs window and up the street to charge a car. Should be using hydrogen. If there was a more forward thinking plan on how to get us off oil I would feel a bit better.

Ali

These are charging Stations in the road. You drive up and plug in

Arkady

Stalin came good in the end then.

grenners

Yeah nice one @Ali I think I takes about 30 mins to charge a car probably more to charge it fully? Its a load of shit.

Ali

I was only trying to be helpful

miss annie

As someone affected by the high pollution I am massively for this.

joust

Come on dudes - about 10,000 people die in London each year because of the air.

We need to be made to change.

Papa

Yes, we need to do something about our air quality, but this is not the answer, in my view.

Such a move is fine within the central congestion charge zone, but the massive ULEZ extension is residential London where normal families live - and forcing people who feel they need to own a car to buy a new one or be charged £12.50 if they drive is wrong.

What makes it worse is that it is at any time of the day or night, every day of the week, with no resident discount.

Rich people are better able to buy new cars, so this is regressive.

Making new cars is overall environmentally much worse than using existing ones.

The statistics on air quality mortality are nowhere near as cut and dry as '10,000 people die in London each year because of the air'. There's a lot of extrapolation, guess work and potential other factors if you drill down into the stats.

Most NOx isn't caused by cars, although they are the single biggest element at 12% for petrol and 24% for diesel. The rest comes from taxis, vans, minibuses, buses, HGVs etc.

Those are 2013 TfL stats and NOx from cars should have fallen since then due to the natural replacement cycle. What is pushing it up considerably is lots of extra vans from all the couriers delivering Amazon parcels etc.

This also fails to take into account how much people may drive their cars vs its pollution level. Classic cars pollute more but most do a few thousand miles per year? Should we wipe them off London's streets?

grenners

I'm not really convinced that going from diesel to petrol is enough of a change. What is Khan doing to ensure that everyone who parks on the street and conveniently charge an electric car. Is it even possible to supply that infrastructure? The busses are the worst but he froze some fares to get elected so TFL will have difficulty investing in those.

joust

I don't think the goal is to get people from diesel to petrol, or even diesel to electric.
The goal should be to stop private car ownership in cites completely.

Everything about london's road plans should make driving your car more difficult.

Arkady

What joust said.