I’m just arguing with people who don’t think any poor people will be affected
Who are those people? Who are you disagreeing with?
Look up “rolling coal” in the USA for it taken to extremes.
https://jalopnik.com/diesel-tuners-hit-with-1m-fine-for-emissions-tampering-1850780397
Remember the wood burner tax?
No
And the pasty tax?
No
And the sugar tax?
You mean the thing that materially reduced the obesity rate among girls?
Only allow vehicles that are essential to the functioning of a town…. Included in this are trades.
Exactly what happens in Zermatt (and only approved EVs at that) with a justification on why vehicle is still required by business every few years. Okay Zermatt is a lot smaller than London but a good model.
The Tory candidate for the next London mayoral election has already publicly claimed that she will scrap it. Although I have my doubts that she actually would – it will generate a lot of revenue for TfL
The Tory candidate for the next London mayoral election makes Liz Truss look smart. She's a right wing, Trump-supporting fan of Boris Johnson who is seriously thick as mince and has so far said a load of total bollocks about what she'll do as Mayor, most of which aren't actually in her powers to do.
Still, the other Tory candidate dropped out because he'd been groping women* so I suppose she's the least worst of the two.
*Allegedly - he "strongly denied" the allegations.
Only allow vehicles that are essential to the functioning of a town
Define "essential"
Although personally I would go further and say that it is a problem which is currently resolving itself. As I have repeatedly pointed out that are less pre 2007 petrol vehicles and pre 2015 diesel vehicles on the roads every day.
So the children who are impacted disproportionately by air pollution should be patient and allow market forces to dictate the pace of change?
The Tory candidate for the next London mayoral election makes Liz Truss look smart.
But I bet Liz Truss can't carry out a full service on a car.
So the children who are impacted disproportionately by air pollution should be patient and allow market forces to dictate the pace of change?
Yeah, like the leader of the Labour Party I don't care if children and little babies die. Well spotted.
Not everyone can afford the luxury of investing money and buying vehicles with the very latest technology
When you say “the very latest technology”, you mean cars with 20-year-old petrol engines? I don’t live in the shit-hole that is London but something that makes it better for everyone can only be a good thing.
To clarify some of the points made above, the value of Euro-5 diesel cars has indeed plummeted in London and the surrounding areas, but they’ve held their value in the rest of the country. Drive down to Devon and swap it for a petrol version at pretty much zero cost. Source: 2 minutes on Autotrader.
Londoners need to get their heads around the fact that they have an enormously disproportionate amount of money invested in them for transport compared to the rest of the UK and that they’ve effectivel been paid off multiple times already.
And on top of this it’s pissing me off that people who should know better are jumping on the “but it’s an attack on the poor” bandwagon in order to object to it without using the line “I’m too cheap too pay or too lazy to use public transport, and don’t give a damn about other people’s health”.
Edit: oh, and EVs don’t produce brake dust. But I still wouldn’t let private ones into London.
When you say “the very latest technology”, you mean cars with 20-year-old petrol engines? I don’t live in the shit-hole that is London but something that makes it better for everyone can only be a good thing.
No I mean vehicles that use adblue technology which has been mostly available for about the last 8 years.
And thank you for your honesty in expressing the view that the city which I live in is a "shit-hole".
Edit: oh, and EVs don’t produce brake dust
Doesn't that rather depend how hard you're braking? I thought they did regenerative braking up to a certain point (as I suspect my MHEV does), but then good old hydraulic discs took over if you mash the pedal (which is where the bigger/heavier issue comes in).
And thank you for your honesty in expressing the view that the city which I live in is a “shit-hole”.
I mean, if it helps it’s still marginally better than Aylesbury.
Look at the people objecting to ULEZ. We’re talking Nigel Farage, Lawrence Fox, the Tories, Kier Starmer, the white-haired Brexit Brigade, anti-vaxxers, anti-LTN groups… basically everyone who doesn’t give a damn about other people. You have to ask yourself whether you’d trust their opinion on anything else, and why you agree with them about ULEZ.
Brake dust - basically you have to stamp on the anchors to get the mechanical brakes engaged on a pure EV and it just doesn’t happen in normal driving. The brake pedal in my Model 3 still has the protective paper sticker from the factory on it because I’ve only pushed it in anger once in two years. Everything else is just lifting off the accelerator.
Look at the people objecting to ULEZ. We’re talking Nigel Farage, Lawrence Fox, the Tories, Kier Starmer, the white-haired Brexit Brigade, anti-vaxxers, anti-LTN groups… basically everyone who doesn’t give a damn about other people. You have to ask yourself whether you’d trust their opinion on anything else, and why you agree with them about ULEZ.
Not very long ago I was being told on here that ulez was Boris Johnson's brainchild and that the ulez expansion was being forced on to Londoners by the current right-wing Tory government.
Now it is being suggested that if you don't support ulez you are jumping into bed with bigots and racists.
Yeah, like the leader of the Labour Party I don’t care if children and little babies die. Well spotted.
seems an odd response. Are you saying I misquoted you or took your comments out of context?
Now it is being suggested that if you don’t support ulez you are jumping into bed with bigots and racists.
Possibly that's overstating it, but if you find yourself on the same side as e.g. Laurence Fox or Piers Corbyn maybe it's time to stop and think?
Now it is being suggested that if you don’t support ulez you are jumping into bed with bigots and racists.
Given that the bigots and racists listed earlier also turned on Boris Johnson and routinely attack the Government, I'd still agree that if you're anti-ULEZ, you're associated with a bunch of bigots and racists.
A while ago, they hijacked various anti-LTN protests and the anti-LTN lot were overjoyed at this swelling of support before it all got called out for what it was - a bunch of right wing thugs. Khan even said as much, something along the lines of "be careful who you're associating with, there's an element of far right conspiracy ****s got in amongst all this" and the anti-LTN lot went mental because they thought Khan had called them far right conspiracy ****s - he hasn't, he'd simply pointed out, entirely correctly, that they were standing alongside far right conspiracy ****s and this was not helping the overall "look" of the protests.
Now it is being suggested that if you don’t support ulez you are jumping into bed with bigots and racists.
Not my intention. The point I’m trying to make is that the said bigots and racists don’t tend to oppose something for altruistic reasons.
You mean the thing that materially reduced the obesity rate among girls?
The same researchers found a squadron of pigs flying over Beachy Head.
I pop back on here just to see how the debate is going…
Just to be absolutely clear, the external cost of cars (i.e. cost to society) is not currently reflected in the cost of driving. The external costs include road building, cost of road traffic accidents, health costs from poor air quality and also from obesity, reduced efficiency of other forms of transport (eg slowing down buses, putting people off cycling). And that’s before the carbon emissions which will cost us all a huge amount in the long term or the spatial issues where areas of land are required for car storage rather than more useful activities.
Trying to bring the cost of driving into line with its impacts is going to be difficult. We’ve become very dependent on cars (particularly in the UK). As with everything that we’ve become unhealthily dependent on, there are various ways to reduce that. Bringing up costs, making it less convenient, increasing restrictions (in particular on the aspects that are most damaging) are all approaches. I think the ULEZ falls within this - particularly as it will raise revenue for TFL which provides the only comprehensive public transport system within the UK and thus provides alternatives to cars.
On the ‘I have to use my car for work’ issue - employers should be providing access to compliant pool cars. The use of ‘grey fleet’ ie personal cars for work is not ideal. Employers are responsible for the state of the vehicles used in the course of work and should already be doing risk assessments and vehicle checks if they are insisting on personal vehicle use. This tends to tilt the risk reward equation in favour of providing employees with vehicles rather than relying on personal cars. Even small employers can do this without huge overheads through car club solutions.
The brake pedal in my Model 3 still has the protective paper sticker from the factory on it because I’ve only pushed it in anger once in two years. Everything else is just lifting off the accelerator.
That's not strictly true in most cars. You may not be pressing the pedal, but the friction brakes are working otherwise you'd never end up coming to a stop. In most EVs and hybrids, you signal to the car how fast you want to stop, either via the brake pedal or throttle (or, bizarrely, the steering wheel paddles on my Hyundai) and the car always uses regeneration to slow down unless that cannot meet your request then it uses friction brakes. The amount of regenerative braking available depends on your speed, so you could slow down at a certain rate on the motorway using regen only, but not around town. If you look at your discs they will show signs of having been used.
That said, they are used far less, and last much much longer. So you probably get I dunno, 1/3 or 1/4 of the brake wear on an EV.
Just to be absolutely clear, the external cost of cars (i.e. cost to society) is not currently reflected in the cost of driving.
True, but there is also a societal benefit to personal mobility. It means that businesses are more able to get the skills they need, and people are more able to get better jobs. Both these things have a major economic benefit. On top of that, individual car ownership works very well when the population density is very low, so that means people in rural areas can still work for example in professional jobs whose locations are not local to them. This brings money into comnunities that would otherwise have disappeared because their traditional sources of employment are no longer viable.
So the debate is very complex. Before you argue with me I'm hugely in favour of public transport and I would spent a load of money on it if I were in charge, even if that money wasn't recovered; but we would also need a high degree of social engineering and planning to get this to work. By adopting a laissez-faire approach since the 60s we have caused these problems we now have.
Doesn’t that rather depend how hard you’re braking? I thought they did regenerative braking up to a certain point (as I suspect my MHEV does), but then good old hydraulic discs took over if you mash the pedal (which is where the bigger/heavier issue comes in).
Early regen equipped cars would only go up to ~1m/s2 of decel and then switch over to friction. It moved to about 2m/s2 when the rules around system safety were updated about 5 years ago. That branched to "regen braking on accel pedal lift" (2m/s2) and "regen braking on brake pedal press" (up to ~4m/s2) in 2021 ish. That's what most current cars have, plus brake blending, so the car can switch back and forth with minimal fuss. Braking on accel pedal is unlikely to change (as it's hard to drive with more than ~2m/s2). But regen on brake pedal will get up to about 6m/s2 with cars currently in development.
Just to put those numbers into perspective, approx 98% of pedal braking is covered in that range. Even in shitholes. Bigger/heavier isn't generally an issue as they also have bigger motors, batteries and invertors, which will allow more regen (the battery and invertor are generally the limiting factors). I'd have to go back through my notes to check the exact numbers.
Biggest issue around brakes at the moment in EVs is *lack* of use. Many manufacturers are experimenting with (and rolling out to the public) various corrosion resistant materials and extra cleaning strategies to get the rust off. And i've seen some very speculative proposals around deleting rear braking systems in EVs.
Tyre dust is also becoming less of an issue, despite the vehicles being heavier. The wheel speed (under both acceleration and deceleration) can be controlled *far* more accurately than it can with an ICE/Friction brake setup. There is the capability to do proper full bore launches in proper performance cars with *almost* zero wheelspin. And all the expensive, difficult, complicated stuff is software. Same goes for braking (but that's a little harder.) Can't do that with ICE/ABS as they are far too slow to react.
FWIW some of the EV race cars are experimenting with some *really* weird braking and traction control systems. Will be interesting times.
And i’ve seen some very speculative proposals around deleting rear braking systems in EVs.
That went *really* well in formula e 🙂
Interesting post mert thanks.
Also seems to be the case that low rolling resistance tyres, with added silica in the compound seem to be much longer lasting. I wonder if 20mph limits will reduce tyre wear?
That went *really* well in formula e
You'd hope that most personal cars aren't driven at formula e speeds ever. In fact, if changing car design to reduce the available friction breaking, you could could limit speeds at the same time (and about time to).
Just on the ‘rural people need cars’ point… I currently live in rural France, in a village of 450 people, 10km from the nearest town (6,000 people) and 50km from the nearest city (100,000). I mainly work remotely so my income doesn’t depend on car ownership and I spend it locally (on food … the village cafe is excellent, as are the markets).
This isn’t ‘so no one should have a car’. I think what I’d like to see in the UK is a French style commitment to public transport. It works better for the country as a whole because more people have access to mobility.
Whilst living in the countryside entirely without a car would be limiting, it’s by no means essential here - I e-bike to the market for the shopping, and to the dentists. There’s a bus that connects with the train for longer trips. I recently had a client meeting in Paris which I went door-to-door by bus and train. I guess my income contributes to the French economy so Monsieur Macron is getting a return on this investment…
A major blocker for people biking from where I live in the suburbs is the layout of the roads, not even the existence of cycling facilities. It's shit for cars too, but also shit for cycling and even busses.
We could solve this with bus and cycling corridors. There is even the land available for it. And I don't just mean some white lines or a blue sign on a footpath through the park, I mean a proper new road that goes where it needs to go but that only has busses and bikes on it.
Londoners need to get their heads around the fact that they have an enormously disproportionate amount of money invested in them for transport compared to the rest of the UK and that they’ve effectivel been paid off multiple times already.
^ this I agree with.
Government spending on transport per capita UK 2022, by region. In 2021/22, transport spending in London was 1,212 British pounds per capita, compared with just 394 pounds per head in the East Midlands
^ the thing is while London does get a lot more spent on public transport and infrastructure I struggle to criticise - because car use is falling and all public or active travel is increasing. Perhaps a reflection of the investment in alternatives - and that carrot is being followed up by the stick of ULEZ....
Government spending on transport per capita UK 2022, by region. In 2021/22, transport spending in London was 1,212 British pounds per capita, compared with just 394 pounds per head in the East Midlands
That doesn't come close to telling the true story though because, as alluded to earlier in the thread, there's very little long term plan or strategy and vast sums of that money are simply pissed up the wall.
I detest the whole "we'll spend £10 per head of population on cycling" attitude as though that'll magically fix everything. What happens is that £9.95 per head of population goes on consulting and trying to come up with an "innovative" design (instead of something that actually ****ing works) and publicity and more consultations and finally some procurement and then some design and project scope changes which require some re-procurement and eventually the remaining 5p per head of population gets spent on some white lines along a bit of pavement.
Same sort of thing happens in rail (HS2 being an astoundingly good example), trams (Edinburgh trams being the absolute gold standard in pissing public money around the place and getting not very much in return), buses (bendy buses)....
I feel like transport should be in that "unreasonable work requests" thread for the amount of money it can waste and the constant changes to project spec that get lumped on it.
Wouldn't be half as much uproar over ULEZ if companies weren't forcing people back into the office, which would also cut down on emissions, but hey what do I know 👀
That doesn’t come close to telling the true story though
Garden Bridge
Bridge to France
Bridge from Ireland to Scotland
New airport in the Thames Estuary...
I wonder if there's a connection between all these?
Should the country get the same per capita everywhere on public transport spending?
Clearly big cities have much greater need due to having many more people who are very difficult to move around, and the solutions are far more expensive. London couldn't function without the tube, and that costs money to keep up. And the GDP per capita in London is way higher than in the East Midlands (about double).
I'm not offering an answer either way, but it's not as simple as 'oh look they get more money spent on their transport than we do'. I suspect that London needs a lot more money spent on transport, but the East Midlands needs more money spent on other things and transport is a bit further down the list.
Wouldn’t be half as much uproar over ULEZ if companies weren’t forcing people back into the office
I know. I mean yes there might be issues with home working but forcing people back to the office is not the solution, IMO. It's the lazy easy thing for companies to do, but it's the employees and society that bears the brunt.
Wouldn’t be half as much uproar over ULEZ if companies weren’t forcing people back into the office, which would also cut down on emissions, but hey what do I know 👀
It didn't lower emissions at all. People still drive - if anything even more than "drive to work, park all day, drive home" because now they're WFH, they're often doing small "quick" local trips - they'll just nip to the shops or just pop out to meet a friend or they'll head out and pick the kids up cos it's raining.
It actually added up to more individual trips, more short journeys locally rather than one (possibly marginally longer) trip to/from the office. Home working is a bit of red herring in this - what that mostly affects is public transport use.
but if you find yourself on the same side as e.g. Laurence Fox or Piers Corbyn maybe it’s time to stop and think?
Why pick those two particular individuals and not two more high profile and better known individuals such as Andy Burnham and Keir Starmer?
Aren't Andy Burnham and Keir Starmer not looney enough for you?
Btw I have absolutely no idea at all what Laurence Fox and Piers Corbyn have said concerning ulez, nor do I care. Presumably you have and you do?
I do know what Andy Burnham and Keir Starmer have said on the issue though. Although I am not greatly influenced by their personal opinions.
It actually added up to more individual trips, more short journeys locally rather than one (possibly marginally longer) trip to/from the office
But were those trips more spread out rather than heading to central locations?
It didn’t lower emissions at all. People still drive – if anything even more than “drive to work, park all day, drive home” because now they’re WFH, they’re often doing small “quick” local trips – they’ll just nip to the shops or just pop out to meet a friend or they’ll head out and pick the kids up cos it’s raining.
Any evidence for this? During lockdown when people worked from home emissions reduced, according to the ONS
During strict lockdown no-one was going anywhere, and roads were pretty quiet, so emissions were clearly a lot lower. But there was a period where we were able to go out and businesses were open, but a lot of offices were still closed whilst people waited to see if WFH would become the norm. It's only relatively recently that companies have started asking people to come back.
Long term though, if we know that working back at the office is required, will we see people considering where the live and take jobs? Perhaps we have all got used to the commute in a car.
Maybe there is something in the 20 minute neighbourhoods/15 minute cities....?
A guy at work was moaning about the ulez charge, until I checked, and found out his 59 plate ford focus was exempt.
People complaining about this really need to get a grip, maybe, ride a bike instead 😁
Aren’t Andy Burnham and Keir Starmer not looney enough for you?
Possibly they’re carefully targeting the silent Tory voters who will turn their backs on them if they publicly support ULEZ?
I don’t think you can really trust Starmer. He seems to be as bad as any incumbent at changing his mind depending on which way the opinion polls are blowing.
Long term though, if we know that working back at the office is required, will we see people considering where the live and take jobs? Perhaps we have all got used to the commute in a car.
The whole reason that a ULEZ is now needed is because society has evolved (with a lot of help from car-centric policies over the decades) to a situation where people can live in the nice pleasant suburbs and commute relatively cheaply to their workplace. Public transport has not (generally) kept pace with the evolution so driving remains the cheap, easy option and more and more people do that.
As society is driven entirely by the wealthy and privileged, as they've moved further out of town to the nice country house but still want to retain their access to a s****y city centre office, that has been enabled via cheap/free car parking on site, the convenience and status of the car and lots of road building programmes with very limited thought or care about public transport, network integration, walking and cycling etc.
And now everyone is wondering why the air is really polluted.
ULEZ (CAZ, LEZ etc) are all answers to decades of failed car-centric policies.
Possibly they’re carefully targeting the silent Tory voters who will turn their backs on them if they publicly support ULEZ?
Or perhaps they just believe that right now during a cost of living crises isn't the best time to add further financial burdens on struggling lower income families......is that a possibility?
It is certainly what Andy Burnham claims. And with over three times more votes than his Tory rival at the last Manchester mayoral election I very much doubt that Burnham is particularly worried about "silent Tory voters".
What does Piers Corbyn have to say on the issue?
