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

vetski

@Arkady, I have also been in a Tesla. It was fun

miss annie

What is one? Is it a spaceship?

tosscat

Is no-one going to mention the real problem being the sprogs in the back of the car on the school run?

Arkady

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/20/give-up-having-children-couples-save-planet-climate-crisis

Papa

Those London Council stats show that air travel causes as much NOx in London air as petrol cars.

Quite how wanting to expand the airport (mainly to allow people to fly in and out of a hub without visiting the country) fits into our haphazard air and environment plans I don't know.

joust

but what about, but what about

Papa

Nice engaging comment there.

joust

I think I said before - having other things that need looking at, or indeed that are more polluting, doesn't mean nothing should be done about cars.

Your arguments seem to be - "but what about X" - which is redirecting the discussion to something else.

The fact I am pro making cars more expensive and difficult to use, doesn't mean I think other issues should be ignored.

tosscat

Mine wasn't an attempt to divert the argument: car ownership will shortly be an anachronism in London and anything to hasten that is a great thing.

Papa

Joust, it seemed as if you were employing an irritating modern day method of shutting down a discussion rather than engaging with it.

I agree with your sentiment that something should be done about car pollution - I just think this warped system is not it.

But this is an air quality issue - not a car issue.

Planes and other NOx pollutants are an integral part of this discussion. Look at the London Councils document that I linked to, it puts them together in a chart on NOx emissions.

Hammering ordinary Londoners for using their car to bring down NOx, while expanding a whacking great airport to produce more NOx are directly related issues.

joust

I think it is a car issue as well, though. All the travel changes in London seem to have the 2nd hand benefit of making it more difficult and less attractive to drive in London. From charges to road design. I hope that they continue doing so - the goal should be to have hardly any private cars in town.

And sure, you are right about air travel. But I think air travel is more necessary than driving to the shops, or dropping someone off at the tube in a car. I'm not sure if I'd class air travel as a public transport. But its somewhere closer than a car is.

Last year they brought in some sort of CO2 offsetting for flights, with the tax going to UN environmental projects. But I think that it only applied to long haul flights or something, and it had some flaws. Its something that needs increasing and tightening up.

rikki

@joust
air fuel is massively subsidised by the public. despite that fact that only 15% of the population fly regularly.
@Papa L i agree totally that hitting cars while expanding Heathrow is absolutely nonsensical. I'd like to see air fuel subsidy stopped, and I'm still mildly confident that Heathrow expansion will never happen.

Ali

Well Boris usnit going to stop it on Monday. He has gone into hiding !

Brodiej

Disappointing high number of BBQs in the area this weekend from Islington residents. It was very difficult to breathe at times. A George foreman grill should be used instead.

Ali

Boris has turned up in Afghanistan

miss annie

I have a couple of friends who live there, one of whom does something top notch secret. Wonder if he could be persuaded to make sure Boris doesn't come back.

Brodiej

In a similar move to the congestion charge, I would like to propose the annual BBQ license which must be purchased if you intend to BBQ in the year. The annual cost would be £183, and would allow you to BBQ every day of the year for just 50p. Businesses such as Bodeans or Petek, would be required to add a new tax onto BBQ food in a similar vein to the sugar tax. Electric grilled items would be tax free, or if you went for a nice charcoal grilled chicken shish you would need to pay the kebab tax. Anyone caught BBQing without a license gets a mandatory 10 year jail sentence.

Papa

Interesting map in this Economist article considering earlier conversations here.
Shows annual average NOx pollution in Greater London mapped by EU limits.

https://www.economist.com/britain/2018/06/28/heathrows-third-runway-could-be-blown-off-course-by-pollution

Most of the EU limit busting goes on in cpngestion charge zone area central London, head out and it falls back within limits judged to be OK (blue) with red lines along some of the major routes.

The North and South Circular is the red inner circle line around the blue bit outside of the centre.

That blue bit between central London and the circulars is where the new £12.50 all-day everyday ULEZ will hit all those with a petrol car from pre-2006 plate and a diesel from pre-2015 plate.

Heathrow is marked as a problem for busting the NOx limits. Interestingly, article says biggest issue is people driving to the airport though.

trainspotter

I don't know about that. Central London is where the whole map is coloured in yellow/red but there are red and yellow lines criss-crossing all over where we live along pretty much all roads, not just major routes. My daughter's nursery is on a fairly quiet street by the Faltering Fullback in a yellow patch, for example. Here's a zoomable version:

https://www.londonair.org.uk/london/asp/annualmaps.asp?species=NO2&LayerStrength=75&lat=51.5008010864&lon=-0.124632000923&zoom=14

trainspotter

Stroud Green Road itself is red, not just the North circular.

joust

That makes it look like it needs expanding to the M25

Papa

Thanks for sending that zoomable link.

Only patches of Stroud Green Road, it's mainly yellow - and yellow is on the limit not over it.

Obviously, below yellow would be better.

Holloway Road, Green Lanes and Seven Sisters red, but you'd expect that from main roads.

Wonder where the air monitoring stations are that they predicted it from. Any idea?

Ali

I saw this on the BBC and thought you should see it:

Illegal levels of air pollution linked to child's death - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-44612642

Brodiej

On the basis that air pollution is killing us all, perhaps we'd all like to comment on the below consultation. All the good work from taking out Diesel cars will be undone, which basically suggests that its all a load of bollocks and that nobody actually cares about public health at all. Or at least they might have a look after the flights are sorted.

I don't believe a word anyone tells me anymore because the motivations are always unclear. As long as these mixed messages are around, you can assume that millions and millions of pounds of inefficiency is happening with your tax funds. Money we can't afford.

https://www.heathrowconsultation.com/

joust

I can get across london without a diesel car, but I would struggle getting to Cyprus without a plane

Papa

But Joust, one of the main justifications for expanding Heathrow isn't even to do with you getting to Cyprus, it's to expand it as a hub - increasing services for people who never even enter the UK.

Papa

Six months after we started this discussion, most people still don't know about the North - South circular ULEZ plan.

They will kick off massively when hundreds of thousands of Londoners realise they need to get rid of their car and spend thousands more on a newer one, or pay £12.50 if they drive it at any time on any day of the week.

If you know what you are looking for, count the cars affected next time you walk down a residential street. It's a lot.

HolbornFox

It makes me wonder if the car manufacturers actually lobbied for it.

grenners

It's a little bit Emmual Macron if you ask me. The people it will affect the most are those low income workers on the periphery that drive in and out of those areas near the north circular. I'm surprised there is no carrot as well as stick in the form of incentives to upgrade vehicles.

Papa

It's not been that widely reported in the UK press but the thing that started the anger and helped trigger the whole gilet jaunes thing was the cutting of speed limits on rural roads last year.

When the fuel tax rises were added to this they did their traditional rise up.

It's the equivalent of our 60mph national speed limit and was cut from 90kph to 80kph - claimed to be for road safety and cutting pollution but these are long, empty roads where 90kph (56mph) is perfectly safe and there was no evidence that driving at 80kph rather than 90kph would reduce accidents, with claims that it would do so debunked by experts.

Most deaths are caused by people driving either way over the limit or drunk - neither of which reducing from 90 to 80 changes.

It was quite heavily enforced by speed traps and speed cameras and the French were fuming about it.