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Comments
How on earth are they going to police it? Cameras on every street to capture every short trip we make to the shops/school/tip/station?
On that note, the 10,000 deaths a year - not entirely sure what the factual basis for these are - any ideas anyone? Deaths from lung cancer (hard to distinguish from smoking)?
Papa if the CCTV cars are annoying you on double yellows photograph them and report to the council
. The law applies to them just as much as anyone else
I got literal abuse and threats from the drivers and Islington wrote back and told me that essential services can park on double yellows.
I also reported some road works that were left for weeks and received different waffle about the gas pipes being Victorian.
I also put in a FOI request about properties being let without appearing on the connections website and was told that the council can make direct offers if they want to (so allocated off record to whoever gives a backhander then).
How set in stone do we think this is? Would a different mayor be likely to change the policy?
They plan to police it with a massive expansion of ANPR cameras (automatic numberplate recognition).
Unfortunate for you Slats, still good news is, if you sell your trusty old car and splash out £103,000 on a new 5 litre V8 3.3 tonne supercharged Range Rover, then you will able to drive around as much as you like without every paying the £12.50 charge.
In the olden days before leasing the best place to buy a second hand car is near to where they are made. It used to be Brum maybe it is Sunderland now for a cheaper Nissan. This was because employees used to get big discounts do changed their cars a lot
From what I remember about 100,000 responses taken into account
Congestion Charge
customers with a
residents’ discount
13,377
Commercial (taxi and
private hire)
127,121
Drivers
382,271
Residents in the
ULEZ expansion
postcodes (with
exclusions)
747,981
Due to policy putting more priority on cutting NOx now, over driving down CO2, we have actually seen CO2 levels rise.
Diesels are good for lower CO2.
What would be a better plan would be if the government and authorities pulled their fingers out and put in place a proper electric car charging infrastructure, to make mass ownership of those a possibility.
We finally have some points going in Stroud Green now on the Islington side. Until very recently the nearest place to charge an electric car publicly for our densely populated, prime target area for encouraging ownership (where the council has an ideological opposition to petrol and diesel cars) was Highbury Fields or the Whittington.
Its interesting to hear your thoughts on private car ownership but I think you'll find a great deal of the British population disagree with you.
You might find that outside of the London bubble most of the UK would be quite shocked at someone who thought the the outlawing of private ownership of cars was a good thing.
Public transport outside London is pretty much universally diabolical. It might be a bit more about necessity than convenience.
My point is that emissions - whether NOx or CO2, are only part of the equation (and let's not forget that electrification often just pushes the emissions upstream anyway).
Individual car usage is selfish for a whole suite of reasons that have been mentioned above. They take up pavement space when parked or road space when moving, causing traffic, ugly streets, and a host of physical dangers. Pavements could be vastly wider (as they were in the past) if we had fewer cars. We could have proper shared surfaces, fewer ugly signs and infrastructure, so on and so on.
You're right that public transport is often bad outside of London, but that's just an argument for improving it.
Yes, lots of people will disagree. But so what? Most people are wrong about most things, most of the time.
What I would add is that automation is likely to radically alter this whole subject anyway. The line between public transport and taxis will be blurred, there will be far fewer private vehicles in individual use, and those that remain will often be leased out as taxis when not being used by the owner. The convenience of having your own vehicle will evaporate, collapsing their desirability, and the idea of having cars parked for any length of time will be regarded as a decadent and selfish waste of resources. That flip will happen soon, and I suspect quite quickly, especially in urban areas, and once it does councils will have further incentives to penalise those who cling onto the past.
I'm sure the architects of many a totalitarian state would fully agree with you.
Democracy isn't justified by majoritarianism, let alone the idea that majorities determine truth, as well you surely know.
I'd personally like to see a lot less private vehicles on city streets. I'm a pedestrian, cyclist, resident and parent. The improvement in both air quality and noise would be of huge value to people.
I'd also like to see a big step up in public transport and vast improvements nationally in the bus services people rely on. With more TfL-style models rather than the current fractured system.
I just happen to disagree with the warped stick being employed with the ULEZ expansion and agree more with the carrot of making electric vehicle ownership in cities a realistic prospect for the masses, vastly improving buses (pure electric ones preferably and potentially with smaller minibus style services where suitably) and then seeding sharing initiatives.
I suspect fully autonomous cars without a driver will take quite a lot longer than expected to arrive, due to the difficulty in gaining public acceptance and the inevitable backlash when more semi-autonomous cars are on the road and we see more accidents involving them in auto-pilot modes.
Driving a car on auto-pilot is unnerving at first but from my experience of using the Tesla system they can work very well.
I think we need to look at the bigger picture for this, and look at total energy consumption and how much is renewable and how much isn't. There is an impact somewhere in the world for every decision you make.
Things that are affecting global warming, that aren't as easy to pick on as a car.....
Smart phones and the energy required to keep them charged all the time
The size of your TV at home
The efficiency of your insulation in your house
Your reaction to when its a bit cold in the living room
How many brews you make a day
Whether you wash at 30 deg or not
Your demand and attitude towards low cost clothing, its production and air miles
Your demand for low cost, season round fruit and vegetables and the air miles
Consumption of non-recyclable materials
Low cost air travel for city breaks
So, its easy to pick on a private car owner, but all your consumption choices have an environmental impact SOMEWHERE. Might not be here in London, but you need to be aware. If you're not killing kids here, then your love of smashed avocados and watching Blue Planet on a 60" plasma will be killing someone else's.
Reverting back to a Nokia 3210 has so many benefits on society I don't know where to start.
Its not that bad.
Wanting to reduce car use doesn't mean that you stop making an effort to not boil a kettle more than needed, or run a cooler wash. They aren't exclusive.
@Brodiej "it would be nice for people to understand that for some it is required" - I don't think anyone has a problem with it where it's actually required. It's where people use it for convenience while claiming it's a requirement that causes eyebrows to be raised.
My point is that the car is an easy target because stuff comes out of the exhaust pipe. That person eating an avocado isn't getting a levy, but who truly knows what their impact is.
Its uncomfortable to know that we're all killing the planet, just wish the stone throwers would acknowledge that lifestyle plays a huge part. Can't imagine the political fallout of addressing that one though. I guess someone decided that mugging off all the diesel owners was a vote winner