Coming soon: the £24 charge for driving into central London - Sensationalist Headlines

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jan/05/london-ultra-low-emission-zone This April will see the start of what the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, proclaims will be the toughest emissions standards for vehicles in any world city. Will it be a historic turning point in the battle against filthy air in our cities – or will it prompt “yellow vest” style protests from furious drivers? Many motorists are unaware of how strict – and expensive – the new rules are for the ultra-low emission zone (ULEZ), which starts on 8 April this year. Diesel cars manufactured before 2015 are likely to fall foul of the rules, as well as most pre-2006 petrol cars. They will be charged £12.50 to come into central London at any time, on top of the £11.50 congestion charge, which operates from Monday to Friday 7am to 6pm. Then from October 2021 the zone will be hugely expanded, with mums and dads on the school run potentially affected, as 3.6 million London residents are brought into the scheme. Any cars failing to meet the standards by then will have to pay £12.50 a day if they are driven anywhere in an area bounded by the city’s north and south circular roads.

there really is no point in driving there unless it is for health reasons. really is a crap place to drive, and the alternatives are so much easier.

When I went there there were huge traffic jams at 10 am on a weekday. Better off just removing cars from the equation.

I'm an American so please correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't it be prudent to decrease the recent increase in fair cost for the tube? If you want to encourage more efficient and greener public transit then train fair ought to be cheaper than the fee. Or was that recent increase in train fair only for more rural parts of the UK?

The tube has fares frozen until 2020. The increase is for actual commuter trains around the country. But a full zone pay as you go fare is like 6.50 USD.

Tradesmen and deliveries have no option but to drive in. Machines and tools can't be moved on public transport of any sort, and yo end up playing well over £100 a day to drive into London and park. I understand why it's this way, but it doesn't make it suck any less that you lose 2 days wages driving your shit there and then picking it up again.

ah yes, London, the city of the rich only

I was wondering this as I've point blank refused to let my company send me anywhere inside the M25. Hostility to wasteful, lazy car traffic with the best public transportation (and cycle network, incidentally) in the country is completely fair and courageous though taxis are going to need to be cracked down on soon, since it's the shitty 04 plate pre-emissions LTCs that are belching all the diseasel fumes and are usually exempt. However, the idea of restricting tradesmen's access to the city centre is ludicrous and short sighted; it's not uncommon for governing bodies to forget that the city runs on men in diesel vans. Making it too expensive to operate in the city means most will take their business elsewhere. Exceptions for taxis should be removed (taxi drivers make a mint and can afford to buy a BEV, plus dedicated BEVs built by taxi companies do exist and are quite excellent) but exceptions for trades are totally necessary. You can buy a BEV van but it's light-class so useless for most trades and has a real life range of about 75 miles. I can tell you for a fact that if ULEV charges like this were levied in any other city in Britain, perhaps save for Edinburgh and maybe Manchester, a lot of tradesmen would be put out of business or back into the big companies.

yeah that's really bad on their part. parking in central london is so awful

It's a goddamn disaster. You can make big money working jobs in London, and on paper it's great. But then you realise you're losing at least £1000 from a 5/6 week job because of trips into London. If an electric van that was halfway affordable existed, I'd be on that 100%. But it's not going to happen any time soon.

Uh oh The battle to bring healthy air to city residents is not just in London. In 2020 Birmingham is planning to introduce pollution charges on cars driving within the city’s ring road, with a £6 to £10 fee mooted. In Leeds there are radical plans to charge the most polluting vehicles up to £50 a day to enter a new clean air zone from January 2020. Meanwhile, Bath has plans to charge many motorists £9 a day to drive into its Georgian streets, but the proposals have provoked anger and resentment.

There's a few full size BEV vans coming to market throughout the year from both VW and Mercedes.

For fuck's sake. I'm not saying we should never do this. But it's just not time yet. What is it with today's politicians at ALL LEVELS and ignorance of the facts?

Most of these initiatives have something supporting local businesses to make the switch in various ways, such as interest free loans or grants. It needs to be done in cities fairly quickly due to the health impacts of diesels, especially the older ones.

I cant wait until we do away with traffic all together in cities and build those vacuum tubes in futurama Honestly seems like theres no point in driving in NYC time I go there.

It's not necessarily about the outlay for an EV, it's the fact that certain classes of vehicle are unavailable. As I've said, excellent BEV taxis exist and yet taxis continue to lobby hard to be exempt. BEV vans do not exist in a usable form and problems exist with BEV use in large companies, for administrative reasons.

Nissan are working on a refrigerated e-NV200. I won't dispute there's a lack of variety in BEV vans at the moment, but with cities making moves like this the demand for them will surge.

I hope so. I feel the lack of progress by a lot of major companies on BEVs has been quite poor so it always feels like legislation is outstripping development - though that may be by choice of those companies, and if that's the case I hope this will force rapid development.

Most of the legacy companies don't really want to embrace the change. No one has developed a BEV van that really knocks the competition out of the park, so none of the legacy automakers have really been forced to do it. Legislation will at least force them to make proper BEV vans. The technology isn't any different from the passenger vehicles, and they can probably share the same powertrain.

Yeah but driving is just objectively better than public transportation. If the metro near me that goes to the nearest mall was free, I'd still drive because taking the metro sucks ass

So a combination of factors for that tends to be the last mile problem (which is exacerbated in the US due to urban sprawl, sheer land mass and that the US unlike most of Europe has generally newer cities which tend to favor autos compared to walking or alternate public transit). Also public funding is another major factor. Autonomous cars are another factor that could remedy part of that, but not all of it. Sure they'll be speedier and more effiiceint than human drivers but you'll still have the density of number of cars on the road at any given time. So autonomous cars, IMO, are only good for the last mile problem, not longer range transit like a metro.

It really depends on the States, some cities have a sane and broad transit system while others are just outright terrible. The other problem is that as much as we talk about Public transit, things like rail lines are only profitable in one corridor, and that's the New York to DC line.

That's another aspect, some urban planners actively hate public transportation because it tends to breakdown (honestly ludicrous) goals of gentrification.

Its less that and just more the fact that our public transit system was kind of shot in the kneecaps during the explosion of the car. We had a working system that got people around with big streets that people could put shop extensions into and then the car pretty much shanked, stabbed, decapitated and than shat on that. Very cities still have Trolly/Cable Cars that aren't more than tourist attractions. Philly being one of them.

There's a tax on driving into the central town in Gothenburg as well, although it is not as absurdly high; barely 3€ at rush hour if I remember.