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London saw a surprising benefit to ultra-low emissions zone: More active kids

332 points by colinprince 2y ago

mzmzmzm 2y ago
It continues to be an absolute travesty that Governor Kathy Hochul is pointlessly blocking NYC from reaping the same benefits...
fennecfoxy 2y ago
And yet having lived in the London area for almost 7 years now (previously born in NZ): In New Zealand I saw large vehicles like utes and defenders doing actual jobs on the terrain that they were built for. The only SUVs that I really saw were out in the wops where they wanted a dual purpose vehicle or the time I saw Saudis laughably trying to drive a 1.5 lane width full-size hummer in central Auckland. Whereas in London, YoY since I moved here I only see more SUVs clogging the narrow roads. No pop-up headlights on a sports car for me, because they'd endanger pedestrians! But a 2 tonne defender with a brick wall of a front is perfectly fine! Not only that but it seems like >20-30% of the vehicles on the road are SUVs and are usually driven by a single occupant! It's honestly think it's a sign of the times and of the direction our futures are going. The dystopian novels were real.
ClassyJacket 2y ago
I don't believe for a second that the reduced emissions are enough for these kids to actually notice. ULEZ is a tax on being poor, nothing more.
- fragmede 2y ago
  Like, at all? pictures of LA smog in the 80's, or Beijing air pollution now should be enough to convince you that the problem is real, even if you don't believe in the latest round of it.
- jprete 2y ago
  > Four in 10 London children stopped driving and started walking to school a year after the city's clean air zone went into effect. I had the same interpretation of the headline as you. But, based on the quote, I think the change is that their parents stopped driving them to school.
- aimazon 2y ago
  Vehicle ownership in London has always been expensive. Poor people have never driven in London, poor people use public transport. For all London's faults (of which there are many) the high population density makes public transport useful. Please share evidence for your assertion that the "ULEZ is a tax on being poor". Only half of households in London have a vehicle.
  - AdamN 2y ago
    They're probably referring to poor (working class really) people living in outer London who have cars and are now basically frozen out of central London unless they use mass transit or pay for entry. There are also legacy car owners who are poor (rent stabilized, etc...). Anyway, the car has a major negative externality on the city's residents and usage should be taxed to reduce the over-usage of the roads regardless of whether the owner is poor or rich.
    - harry_ord 2y ago
      Congestion charge and parking availability would have already frozen out most lower owners driving into Central London (zone 1 and 2). What does rent stabilised mean here? Not a phrase I've ever heard regarding council housing in the UK.
      - hkt 2y ago
        Probably council housing or housing association tenants. My guess is that the person who said "rent stabilised" is American, as it is an American term - I know new yorkers in rent stabilised housing.
        chgs 2y ago
        One of the many problems with the internet is the export of American culture. Given the time of day it’s likely OP was just repeating YouTube talking points from outrage bait videos, rather than being an actual American, but the infection remains regardless, the whole “hands up don’t shoot” nonsense where people in the U.K. acted like the police were armed for example
- ein0p 2y ago
  The poor do not live in the center of London. It’s one of the most expensive places in the world.
  - aimazon 2y ago
    London, like most major cities, has significant wealth disparity: central London is filled with high-earning transplants living side by side with impoverished locals. Southwark is the London borough containing The Shard, Tate Modern, Borough Market, Tower Bridge yet almost 30% of children in Southwark live in poverty. Poverty touches every part of London. Even the City of London has housing estates.
    - literallycancer 2y ago
      Living in an apartment rather than a house is a strange definition of poverty.
      - sabbaticaldev 2y ago
        some people don’t know poverty and equate not being rich to being poor
      - rr808 2y ago
        Its common in British cities for most owners/renters to have terraced or detached housing while council houses (public housing) are in tower blocks or smaller apartment buildings.
        torginus 2y ago
        I'm pretty sure anyone around there who owns his apartment does not fit the definition of poor - in fact most of the so-called rich would take more than a decade of saving up just so that they could own the same property. The great tragedy of Europe is that asset wealth has far outpaced the earnings potential of the population.
        2y ago
- ambicapter 2y ago
  Why do you think emissions levels are what the kids detected that changed their behavior? I would posit reducing emissions levels had a knock-on effect that had some other effect, etc. until the last effect in the chain was what made the kids change their behavior.
- _visgean 2y ago
  The article never claims that the children notice the emission decrease. The claim is simply that more of them use active transport to school.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- boredpeter 2y ago
  And is car dependency not a tax on the poor as well? If the government only builds car-based infrastructure that requires a car then that is a tax on everyone is it not?
- resoluteteeth 2y ago
  Despite "emission" being in the name of the ULEZ, I don't think the article is necessarily implying that the mechanism is specifically that kids were more willing to go outside because there was less pollution. There are various other possible mechanisms: parents decided not to drive their kids based on the fees, there were fewer cars on the road which made it more pleasant for kids to walk to school, etc.
- QasimK 2y ago
  I don’t know if kids notice, but I can smell the air pollution every time I drive into outer London from outside London. It’s how I know I’m entering London.
- CalRobert 2y ago
  Reality doesn’t care about your beliefs
carlgreene 2y ago
I wish the article stated if the amount of cars traveling in the zone remained the same. I would think it probably greatly reduced the amount of traffic in that area, which all around just makes for a more pleasant experience being a pedestrian, biker, or scooterer. Regardless, I think this is awesome and wish it could be tried in the United States. Kids being able to be independent and active is essential to their happiness and development.
- naming_the_user 2y ago
  I haven't really noticed any difference in traffic levels. It dipped a bit during COVID for obvious reasons and now it's back to how it was for the most part. https://roadtraffic.dft.gov.uk/regions/6 https://roadtraffic.dft.gov.uk/regions/6 has a good chart - 20 billion vehicle miles to 19 billion. Interestingly from the chart, local traffic stayed about the same whilst main roads seem to have lost a little. The ULEZ zone is now basically all of the city, it doesn't quite go to the M25 (motorway ring road) but anywhere that a tourist would even remotely think of as being London is well inside it.
  - fecal_henge 2y ago
    One thing to add is that the intention is to change the type of car driven.
- rickydroll 2y ago
  > Kids being able to be independent and active is essential to their happiness and development Add to that growing up with a dog or cat (implies parents are well off enough to take care of said animal when the kid is a kid and spaces being responsible) and living when they can play in wild spaces (not manicured lawns), plant flowers, veg, etc. learn getting stung suks but usually not fatal. A big plus is being around livestock and as the kids mature, having an opportunity to take care of said livestock (4H program)
  - manuelmoreale 2y ago
    Hard to do that if you grow up in the middle of London.
naming_the_user 2y ago
My 2c as a local: a significant issue with any discussion of this is that people don't really have a good handle on the actual statistics of who drives in London. It cuts across every demographic. Under 25k household income - a good 40-50% of households have a car. Housing estates - tons of cars. Well off - almost everyone. https://content.tfl.gov.uk/technical-note-12-how-many-cars-are-there-in-london.pdf https://content.tfl.gov.uk/technical-note-12-how-many-cars-a... It mostly comes down to whether someone has a need (e.g. has children, fairly mobile in their job, has family outside of town, enjoys going on road trips etc) and actually wants to pay for it rather than anything else. In addition to that, a bunch of stuff happened basically at the same time. We got ULEZ, we got a ton of low traffic neighbourhoods (e.g. streets where cars are not allowed at certain times of day regardless of emissions), we had COVID meaning that habits and demographics changed, we had Brexit which probably had some minor effect, etc. All of that happened within about 5 years and I don't think you can isolate any of them. I don't really find most discussions about it interesting as a result of all of the above - it usually just ends up with someone trying to find evidence for their pre-existing position rather than anything that feels actually scientific, unfortunately.
- fecal_henge 2y ago
  I had a chat with some older people who told me distainfully that the only consequence of ULEZ was that they were not going to drive as much. I just hope it gains enough inertia so that a theoretical future populist Mayor cant just sweep it aside.
  - zik 2y ago
    > ...told me distainfully that the only consequence of ULEZ was that they were not going to drive as much. Did they not realise that's literally the whole point?
    - iamacyborg 2y ago
      The point isn’t to stop folks from driving. The point was to stop them using highly polluting cars.
gpvos 2y ago
"Their annual health assessments". Is that something everyone, or maybe every student, in the UK has?
- AdamN 2y ago
  In Germany there are a few key milestone years that are heavily documented (forget which years) and every kid has to do that with their pediatrician. In the US it's typical to have an annual exam with their pediatrician - this is free and standard for everybody with health insurance (which includes medicaid and state programs). Unlike Germany though I think a parent could be disengaged and that would mean multiple years without a checkup. In Germany I think they'd know and check in on the family if those milestone checkups weren't done.
  - jonp888 2y ago
    In Germany children are required to go to school(although not necessarily a state-run school) so I guess it would be harder for a family to be "off grid".
- desas 2y ago
  > "Their annual health assessments". Is that something everyone, or maybe every student, in the UK has? No. It's badly phrased in the article but the annual health assessment is something being done as part of this research, nothing bigger
- Citizen_Lame 2y ago
  Not really.Maybe if you are over certian age, but you can barely get a GP appointment when you need it.
  - ta1243 2y ago
    Never have a problem getting a GP appointment, for me, or the kids, either where I live now or where I lived 5 years ago. I assume it depends where you live if there really are shortages rather than just complaints. Or you can do like America does and pay £80 (or a £15/month subscription) for a private one through BUPA
kypro 2y ago
Perhaps they should make buses prohibitively expensive too, then everyone would be forced to either walk or bike to work/school. Am I missing something here? Obviously if you apply sin taxes to driving then people who can't afford to pay them are going to be forced to drive less. I bet there would be plenty of "surprising benefits" if we banned all road vehicles and forced people to get around on foot and push bike too... This article seems to be both making an extremely obvious observation (that the introduction of ULEZ is forcing poor families to get around the city in alternative ways) and missing the fact that such decisions come with both positives and negatives which need to be weighed up. If we simply want to implement policies to benefit children's health then we'd probably be better off banning junk food. But we don't do that because we understand that there are trade-offs. ULEZ has been a disaster for many working families and it's highly unpopular for a reason. If you're poor and don't live in the inner city, or if you don't have a nice middle-class office job and need your car/van for work then ULEZ makes you poorer and your life more difficult.
- jojobas 2y ago
  Yeah, we should make all achievements of the 20th century prohibitively expensive, that'll show them. The more mobile people will just move out somewhere reasonable, the less mobile will suffer. But that's ok, for adversity brings out inner strength.
  - chgs 2y ago
    In the real world demand for housing in London is insatiable. The cheapest borough has an average cost of 10 times the average salary for a house, and it increases from there.
  - Earw0rm 2y ago
    So London house prices will crash because it's not affordable to live there? Sounds unlikely tbh, but might not be a bad thing if it did.
  - leoedin 2y ago
    Roads with loads of cars are unpleasant. Yes, the car is a great achievement, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strive to have quiet streets too. Ultimately though the ULEZ isn’t even going to affect that. The percentage of cars affected is fairly small and shrinking each year.
MisterBastahrd 2y ago
You want more active kids in the US? This is easy. Every neighborhood needs to have multiple adjacent lots with no construction on it. Aka, a park of sorts. It doesn't need to have slides, or games, or any of that other stuff. It just needs to be an open space with enough room that groups of kids can go and engage in outdoor activities without the need to be constantly monitored by adults. That's it. They can play football or baseball or soccer or frisbee or tag. Doesn't matter. What matters is that you give them the room and let them do their own thing. Not only would this help them be more active, but it'd help them socialize a great deal more than they normally do.
- analog31 2y ago
  My neighborhood has a big city park just across the street from our house, with a lot of free / empty space. One observation: The kids are too busy to go there, as they're kept occupied by homework and organized extracurriculars.
  - LVB 2y ago
    We're seeing (and contributing to, if I'm honest) this parenting mindset that you have to keep kids busy to "keep them out of trouble", thus the schedules get loaded up with organized activities. At least one outcome is that we reached a point where basically none of my kids friends were ever around for just... play. Then our kids are bored, and we'd like them to be doing something with others too, and soon we're signing up them up for activities and the cycle perpetuates.
    - Tade0 2y ago
      I had a culture shock regarding this around a decade ago when my coworker declared (with pride) that his teenage son has his schedule filled up to the brim. I recall thinking how to respond. Was that a good thing? What was he so proud of? Two extracurriculars were already a lot back in my school days. To add to the confusion the kids in my neighbourhood don't seem to attend many classes as I see them on the playground. Is this an upper-middle class thing that I'm supposed to participate in now?
woodpanel 2y ago
As many are pointing out that there is no reduction of actual daily traffic in London I recon that if ULEZ has an effect at all, it is soley caused by the gentrification London's government effectivly creates by increasing the cost of living.
- Earw0rm 2y ago
  How is walking to school or cleaner air caused by gentrification? If anything it's the other way around - cleaner air making it more desirable to live downtown, leading to higher prices?
- rsynnott 2y ago
  Really? Have you got data on that? Everything I can find does show a drop, though difficult to disentangle from COVID. And certainly the original congestion charge produced a dramatic drop.
mrcartmeneses 2y ago
The air in London is noticeably cleaner than it used to be. Londoners should be proud of what has been achieved
- willvarfar 2y ago
  I remember visiting London and doing tourist walky things for a day thirty years ago and blowing my nose and noticing the snot was black. Has that changed?
  - mrcartmeneses 2y ago
    Yes as long as you stay off the deeper parts of tube, e.g the Northern Line. One of London’s biggest sources of particulate pollution is now tube train brake pads
  - sanswork 2y ago
    That was more of a trip on the underground thing
  - martin-adams 2y ago
    You know, I think that has. I remember this happening, but the recent years I’ve been into London on occasion, this doesn’t seem to be a problem anymore.
  - taylorius 2y ago
    I'd say so for sure. I've lived in London most of my adult life, and in my experience the air is a lot better than it used to be.
    - input_sh 2y ago
      Evidence: https://aqicn.org/historical#!city:london https://aqicn.org/historical#!city:london Note that this shows Chinese Air Quality Index, which is different than EU AQI, which is different than US AQI, which is different than... you get the point. But at the end of the day they all use the same data.
Rayaan22 2y ago
[flagged]
w3news 2y ago
Emission zone shouldnt be the issue, it is about the amount of cars and road safety for every user. Check e.g. the Dutch road design, where many kids ride bikes. This is already for decades, and has nothing to do with emission zones. But another road design can also help reducing emissions. It is about how many people can travel safe, and with big cities, you have to reduce cars to increase the amount of people that can travel safe, like bikes, walking, and public transport. Road and city design is very important for a livable city.
- Cclayt1123 2y ago
  Given the challenges of enforcing strict regulations on emissions, could a market-based approach like a carbon tax be a more effective deterrent for high-emission vehicles and corporate practices?
- microtonal 2y ago
  This. Though it doesn’t stop at road design. You also have to change the regulations so that car drivers are (partially) legally responsible for accidents, even when a cyclist or pedestrian made the error. Pedestrians and cyclists are orders of magnitude more vulnerable. Putting much more of the legal burden on car drivers makes them more careful. The hard part is that you also need to build a cycling culture. Most car drivers in NL are more mindful of cyclists, because they are cyclists themselves as well. Circling back to road design. In our mid-sized Dutch city, it’s often faster to go from A to B than by bike than by car because of the excellent biking infrastructure and car-free city center. Everything is designed around cycling, some traffic lights will even give bikes a green light more often when it’s raining.
  - richardw 2y ago
    I wonder if the flatness of the country plays a part? I live on a hill and am surrounded by hills. A 3km ride in any direction and back is hard work. Lots of e-bikes here, and lots of mountain biking. But when I suggested getting a bike to my SO for her to get to the closest bus stop faster, the hills were the reason why she’d rather walk.
paganel 2y ago
The kids of the well-off getting to play a little bit more because the poors’ cars have been moved out of the city, and this is somehow celebrated. The upper-middle-classes are so out of touch with things that it’s scary.
- hkt 2y ago
  Maybe you're right. Maybe it is time to ban private cars in London in the name of fairness. That'd be good. Splendid idea!
- chgs 2y ago
  My 20 year old banger worth half what the scrappage amount is is ulez compliant Of course I good never hope to afford to live in London so I suspect “poor people in London is a myth, or of course those with massively subsidised lives already.
  - paganel 2y ago
    For now, give it a couple of years. The very fact that you're thinking about "is my car compliant?" is already a win for them.
BartjeD 2y ago
When I stayed in London half a year ago, we overnighted in the Limehouse area, at the edge / outside of the ULEZ. I can tell from experience there is a big difference in the air. In that area it smelled like exhaust and smog, while the center had no such thing. When I reflect on it, I feel that the less affluent areas have been left out to dry / rot in the exhaust. While the upper class city center is now pristine.
- leoedin 2y ago
  The ULEZ has covered the entirety of London, including Limehouse, for more than a year. The outer zones of the city are definitely dirtier, but it has less to do with ULEZ and more to do with practical travel times. Despite great public transport, getting between the spokes of the wheel is still a challenge, so people who don’t work in the city centre often drive. The further out you go, the more people like that there are.
- chgs 2y ago
  Limehouse is way inside the ULEZ, like miles inside.
  - philipwhiuk 2y ago
    It is, but East London has had terrible air for years. Cars don't help, but there's lots of sources (City airport for starters)
    - everfrustrated 2y ago
      >for years Centuries in fact. The prevailing wind is from the west so the worst air has always been found in the east.
      - WithinReason 2y ago
        Yes, that's why it's usually the east part of large towns that is the poorer area, and the west is rich.
rsynnott 2y ago
I mean, define ‘surprising’. “We made walking easier and driving more difficult, and now people are walking more. How very surprising!”
PeterStuer 2y ago
Brussels is planning to go EV only by 2035. At this point, there is alost no significant investments in charging capacity. Even worse, landlords are refusing to install charge points in basement garages, presumably because of insurance costs. I'm not against EV at all, even though it is overhyped on the one side and demonized on the other. What bothers me is the hypocrisy in messaging. You can not pretend going full EV in 10 years and not be on a never befote seen giant grid replacement right now. So what is it? Are you going to make car ownership in the city a 1% privilege? Will not much change but will everybody have to pay the exemption fee (oh yes, that exists)? Both can be an acceptable position, just don't pretend.
- arghwhat 2y ago
  It is true that politicians are not pushing charging infrastructure sufficiently - which they absolutely could, seeing they push other ridiculous and costly requirements like absurd parking space allocations - and that this needs to change. This is unfortunately common in politics. It is far, far cheaper to say things than to do things, and if they can both look good for the people that care about this, and avoid risking annoying anyone that don't care by making proposals they could protest over, then it that ends up being a win-win for them. Politics is unfortunately mainly PR these days. But the reason EVs need to be "overhyped" is because ICE's are not sufficiently demonized to show their true gap. We keep turning our blind eye to ICE's because it is more convenient, and if we keep pretending ICE's are "maybe not great but okay", then EVs have to look ridiculously amazing to show their gap and be worth the infrastructure investment. In reality, EVs are the "okay-ish" baseline, and ICE's should be banished all the way back to the 17th century for anything but very specific commercial applications that currently have no suitable replacement.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- Cthulhu_ 2y ago
  Yeah I'm fairly sure both politicians and car manufacturers are dialing back on their EV push; governments' subsidy pots are emptied out, there's no healthy secondhand market yet, and there's heavy competition and/or market dominance (including raw materials and batteries, but also government-assisted low prices) from China. I think that's got politicians nervous. News from Germany is that VW is closing down its German car factories. That's a huge setback. https://www.ft.com/content/f32c172b-d5e9-4397-8831-c61987380e6d https://www.ft.com/content/f32c172b-d5e9-4397-8831-c61987380...
occz 2y ago
This is good, but I wouldn't classify it as surprising - urbanist advocates have been going on about this for years and years. Remove the dangerous and unpleasant elements from the streetscape (cars) and active transportation flourishes (walking, biking, transit).
Mvandenbergh 2y ago
This is a terrible article, written by someone who is either dishonest or doesn't know what they're talking about and has never been to London, covering a paper that appears to be reasonably well done but has some serious limitations. The study is here: https://ijbnpa.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12966-024-01621-7 https://ijbnpa.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12966-024... The data was collected during the 2018/2019 academic year and then during the 2019/2020 academic year (but before the Covid school closures). First, some context: -The original ULEZ, which the referenced study looked at covers central London and should not be confused with the much larger recently expanded ULEZ which covers the whole city. Nor should it be confused with the much smaller congestion charging zone or the larger and older Low Emission Zone which covers freight vehicles. -The ULEZ rules are designed around penalising the driving of the oldest and most polluting vehicles only. In 2019 this was 80% of cars, the expanded ULEZ has overall vehicle compliance of 95%+. As as result of the second point, it would not be expected that it would have a substantial effect on the number of vehicle journeys since 80% of passenger cars in the zone were already compliant anyway, therefore any effect at all is actually surprising. The paper notes a drop of 9% in total vehicle counts. "Four in 10 London children stopped driving and started walking to school a year after the city's clean air zone went into effect." This little quote heads the article. It seems like quite a result, right? It isn't. Let's look at the baselines here, something which immediately anyone who lives in London would be suspicious about because like me their first question would be: "who was driving their kids to school in central London in 2019? Are there enough for there to be four in ten at baseline to switch?". It turns out not many people do, and no. Let's look at table 2 from the paper: (there were about 1000 kids in both the Luton and London samples) At baseline, 856 kids in London travelled using active modes and 105 using inactive modes In Luton that was 599 and 364 respectively So first, we can say that "four in ten children" has to be interpreted pretty carefully here since 85% of kids were already walking to school (note that if they just took the bus the whole way this also counted as walking). At most, we must be talking about changes to the minority of kids who weren't using active travel before, in other words maybe it's that "Four in 10 London children (of the minority who were being driven) started walking to school. But, if we look at the changes, that doesn't quite stack up either. In London: 47 kids switched from active to inactive (all measured based on travel "today" and in many cases there will be variation in modes across days) 44 switched from inactive to active 61 inactive/inactive 809 active/active In Luton: 124 active/inactive 74 inactive/active 290 inactive/inactive 475 active/active It doesn't look like, ignoring the Luton control for the moment, there was any modal shift at all for London! Luton has proportionally shifted away from active transport and only in relative terms to the control has there been a modal shift. This is already a much less positive message. "Kids in general less likely to walk to school, except in London where (potentially due to a low emissions zone) their behaviour didn't change." Where's my four in 10 gone? The "four in 10" comes from the 44 kids who were inactive in the first sample but active in the second (out of 105 total inactive in first sample). Of course that is a much larger % of children from that group who switched in that direction than the 47 who switched the other way from much larger number of first sample actives. If your transition probabilities from A to B are much higher than B to A, but B is much larger group, you can end up in this situation here where you have impressive sounding % changes which nonetheless mean nothing and don't change the population behaviour at all. It's a very fine thing, no doubt, to run multilevel binomial logistic regression models on data and come up with statistically significant odds ratios but I don't think these results remotely justify the news article headline and subhead.
1udsdhoasfih 2y ago
Side-note: in the EU, it is currently surprisingly hard to comply with LEZ. Every state has their own scheme, with information only on third-party websites. Just some examples: * France requires postal pre-registration (they send you a sticker) * in Italy you have to check with each municipality, who at best show you a low-res drawing of the LEZ * (Italy:) Google Maps doesn't know about Low Emission Zones, so it happily sends you through * (Italy, too:) There seem to be very little pedestrian zones. You can drive everywhere, through the Low Traffic Zone might not permit you through. For Google Maps, you can drive everywhere… but you'll end up getting a fine. I'd like to see way more LEZ, but in practice, it is such a mess unfortunately…
tim333 2y ago
As a Londoner in the ULEZ with a car and a bicycle, there were a lot of other changes in that general period to push people away from driving and towards cycling and the like. Blocking streets to cars, removing parking places and the like. I now find with an ebike getting from a to b in the center takes like 1/2 to 1/3 the time as driving - the cars are all stuck in non moving queues at traffic lights.
- isaacremuant 2y ago
  The ebikes get vandalized like crazy. There's more restrictions on where to park them every day and the cost is prohibitive for lower income users. The green pushes govs perform tend to be a lie that benefit the wealthy and little more. Trains are much more expensive than planes. Tax incentives for expensive electric cars.
  - tim333 2y ago
    Well, nothing's perfect. I guess they try to do what they can. I boght my ebike used for £200 which is quite a lot less than a one year bus/tube pass (£1700 zone 1-2) or just the road tax on the car (£360). I'll give you the app based ebikes cost a bit although you can gat monthly passes that are not too bad.
vfclists 2y ago
Roads Were Not Built for Cars - https://roadswerenotbuiltforcars.com/ https://roadswerenotbuiltforcars.com/ There's More To Dutch Roads Than You Think - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4ya3V-s4I0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4ya3V-s4I0
johanneskanybal 2y ago
"Four in 10 London children stopped driving and started walking to school a year after the city's clean air zone went into effect." And think of all the accidents avoided from these guys not driving to school!
galactus 2y ago
How on earth could that be surprising?
chx 2y ago
The daily charge is only for vehicles not meeting the ULEZ standards. For petrol vehicles this means meeting the Euro 4 criteria from 2005, for diesel it means meeting the Euro 6 criteria from 2014. It's hardly a surprise approximately 96% of vehicles are estimated to be ULEZ compliant in Greater London. I think this article is mixing up correlation vs. causation. Funny sidenote: since the ULEZ now covers Heathrow, what's the charge for an Airbus A380?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

332 points by colinprince 2y ago

It continues to be an absolute travesty that Governor Kathy Hochul is pointlessly blocking NYC from reaping the same benefits...

fennecfoxy 2y ago

And yet having lived in the London area for almost 7 years now (previously born in NZ): In New Zealand I saw large vehicles like utes and defenders doing actual jobs on the terrain that they were built for. The only SUVs that I really saw were out in the wops where they wanted a dual purpose vehicle or the time I saw Saudis laughably trying to drive a 1.5 lane width full-size hummer in central Auckland. Whereas in London, YoY since I moved here I only see more SUVs clogging the narrow roads. No pop-up headlights on a sports car for me, because they'd endanger pedestrians! But a 2 tonne defender with a brick wall of a front is perfectly fine! Not only that but it seems like >20-30% of the vehicles on the road are SUVs and are usually driven by a single occupant! It's honestly think it's a sign of the times and of the direction our futures are going. The dystopian novels were real.

ClassyJacket 2y ago

I don't believe for a second that the reduced emissions are enough for these kids to actually notice. ULEZ is a tax on being poor, nothing more.

fragmede 2y ago
Like, at all? pictures of LA smog in the 80's, or Beijing air pollution now should be enough to convince you that the problem is real, even if you don't believe in the latest round of it.
jprete 2y ago
> Four in 10 London children stopped driving and started walking to school a year after the city's clean air zone went into effect. I had the same interpretation of the headline as you. But, based on the quote, I think the change is that their parents stopped driving them to school.
aimazon 2y ago
Vehicle ownership in London has always been expensive. Poor people have never driven in London, poor people use public transport. For all London's faults (of which there are many) the high population density makes public transport useful. Please share evidence for your assertion that the "ULEZ is a tax on being poor". Only half of households in London have a vehicle.
- AdamN 2y ago
  They're probably referring to poor (working class really) people living in outer London who have cars and are now basically frozen out of central London unless they use mass transit or pay for entry. There are also legacy car owners who are poor (rent stabilized, etc...). Anyway, the car has a major negative externality on the city's residents and usage should be taxed to reduce the over-usage of the roads regardless of whether the owner is poor or rich.
  - harry_ord 2y ago
    Congestion charge and parking availability would have already frozen out most lower owners driving into Central London (zone 1 and 2). What does rent stabilised mean here? Not a phrase I've ever heard regarding council housing in the UK.
    - hkt 2y ago
      Probably council housing or housing association tenants. My guess is that the person who said "rent stabilised" is American, as it is an American term - I know new yorkers in rent stabilised housing.
      - chgs 2y ago
        One of the many problems with the internet is the export of American culture. Given the time of day it’s likely OP was just repeating YouTube talking points from outrage bait videos, rather than being an actual American, but the infection remains regardless, the whole “hands up don’t shoot” nonsense where people in the U.K. acted like the police were armed for example
ein0p 2y ago
The poor do not live in the center of London. It’s one of the most expensive places in the world.
- aimazon 2y ago
  London, like most major cities, has significant wealth disparity: central London is filled with high-earning transplants living side by side with impoverished locals. Southwark is the London borough containing The Shard, Tate Modern, Borough Market, Tower Bridge yet almost 30% of children in Southwark live in poverty. Poverty touches every part of London. Even the City of London has housing estates.
  - literallycancer 2y ago
    Living in an apartment rather than a house is a strange definition of poverty.
    - sabbaticaldev 2y ago
      some people don’t know poverty and equate not being rich to being poor
    - rr808 2y ago
      Its common in British cities for most owners/renters to have terraced or detached housing while council houses (public housing) are in tower blocks or smaller apartment buildings.
      - torginus 2y ago
        I'm pretty sure anyone around there who owns his apartment does not fit the definition of poor - in fact most of the so-called rich would take more than a decade of saving up just so that they could own the same property. The great tragedy of Europe is that asset wealth has far outpaced the earnings potential of the population.
        2y ago
ambicapter 2y ago
Why do you think emissions levels are what the kids detected that changed their behavior? I would posit reducing emissions levels had a knock-on effect that had some other effect, etc. until the last effect in the chain was what made the kids change their behavior.
_visgean 2y ago
The article never claims that the children notice the emission decrease. The claim is simply that more of them use active transport to school.
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boredpeter 2y ago
And is car dependency not a tax on the poor as well? If the government only builds car-based infrastructure that requires a car then that is a tax on everyone is it not?
resoluteteeth 2y ago
Despite "emission" being in the name of the ULEZ, I don't think the article is necessarily implying that the mechanism is specifically that kids were more willing to go outside because there was less pollution. There are various other possible mechanisms: parents decided not to drive their kids based on the fees, there were fewer cars on the road which made it more pleasant for kids to walk to school, etc.
QasimK 2y ago
I don’t know if kids notice, but I can smell the air pollution every time I drive into outer London from outside London. It’s how I know I’m entering London.
CalRobert 2y ago
Reality doesn’t care about your beliefs

carlgreene 2y ago

I wish the article stated if the amount of cars traveling in the zone remained the same. I would think it probably greatly reduced the amount of traffic in that area, which all around just makes for a more pleasant experience being a pedestrian, biker, or scooterer. Regardless, I think this is awesome and wish it could be tried in the United States. Kids being able to be independent and active is essential to their happiness and development.

naming_the_user 2y ago
I haven't really noticed any difference in traffic levels. It dipped a bit during COVID for obvious reasons and now it's back to how it was for the most part. https://roadtraffic.dft.gov.uk/regions/6 https://roadtraffic.dft.gov.uk/regions/6 has a good chart - 20 billion vehicle miles to 19 billion. Interestingly from the chart, local traffic stayed about the same whilst main roads seem to have lost a little. The ULEZ zone is now basically all of the city, it doesn't quite go to the M25 (motorway ring road) but anywhere that a tourist would even remotely think of as being London is well inside it.
- fecal_henge 2y ago
  One thing to add is that the intention is to change the type of car driven.
rickydroll 2y ago
> Kids being able to be independent and active is essential to their happiness and development Add to that growing up with a dog or cat (implies parents are well off enough to take care of said animal when the kid is a kid and spaces being responsible) and living when they can play in wild spaces (not manicured lawns), plant flowers, veg, etc. learn getting stung suks but usually not fatal. A big plus is being around livestock and as the kids mature, having an opportunity to take care of said livestock (4H program)
- manuelmoreale 2y ago
  Hard to do that if you grow up in the middle of London.

naming_the_user 2y ago

My 2c as a local: a significant issue with any discussion of this is that people don't really have a good handle on the actual statistics of who drives in London. It cuts across every demographic. Under 25k household income - a good 40-50% of households have a car. Housing estates - tons of cars. Well off - almost everyone. https://content.tfl.gov.uk/technical-note-12-how-many-cars-are-there-in-london.pdf https://content.tfl.gov.uk/technical-note-12-how-many-cars-a... It mostly comes down to whether someone has a need (e.g. has children, fairly mobile in their job, has family outside of town, enjoys going on road trips etc) and actually wants to pay for it rather than anything else. In addition to that, a bunch of stuff happened basically at the same time. We got ULEZ, we got a ton of low traffic neighbourhoods (e.g. streets where cars are not allowed at certain times of day regardless of emissions), we had COVID meaning that habits and demographics changed, we had Brexit which probably had some minor effect, etc. All of that happened within about 5 years and I don't think you can isolate any of them. I don't really find most discussions about it interesting as a result of all of the above - it usually just ends up with someone trying to find evidence for their pre-existing position rather than anything that feels actually scientific, unfortunately.

fecal_henge 2y ago
I had a chat with some older people who told me distainfully that the only consequence of ULEZ was that they were not going to drive as much. I just hope it gains enough inertia so that a theoretical future populist Mayor cant just sweep it aside.
- zik 2y ago
  > ...told me distainfully that the only consequence of ULEZ was that they were not going to drive as much. Did they not realise that's literally the whole point?
  - iamacyborg 2y ago
    The point isn’t to stop folks from driving. The point was to stop them using highly polluting cars.

gpvos 2y ago

"Their annual health assessments". Is that something everyone, or maybe every student, in the UK has?

AdamN 2y ago
In Germany there are a few key milestone years that are heavily documented (forget which years) and every kid has to do that with their pediatrician. In the US it's typical to have an annual exam with their pediatrician - this is free and standard for everybody with health insurance (which includes medicaid and state programs). Unlike Germany though I think a parent could be disengaged and that would mean multiple years without a checkup. In Germany I think they'd know and check in on the family if those milestone checkups weren't done.
- jonp888 2y ago
  In Germany children are required to go to school(although not necessarily a state-run school) so I guess it would be harder for a family to be "off grid".
desas 2y ago
> "Their annual health assessments". Is that something everyone, or maybe every student, in the UK has? No. It's badly phrased in the article but the annual health assessment is something being done as part of this research, nothing bigger
Citizen_Lame 2y ago
Not really.Maybe if you are over certian age, but you can barely get a GP appointment when you need it.
- ta1243 2y ago
  Never have a problem getting a GP appointment, for me, or the kids, either where I live now or where I lived 5 years ago. I assume it depends where you live if there really are shortages rather than just complaints. Or you can do like America does and pay £80 (or a £15/month subscription) for a private one through BUPA

kypro 2y ago

Perhaps they should make buses prohibitively expensive too, then everyone would be forced to either walk or bike to work/school. Am I missing something here? Obviously if you apply sin taxes to driving then people who can't afford to pay them are going to be forced to drive less. I bet there would be plenty of "surprising benefits" if we banned all road vehicles and forced people to get around on foot and push bike too... This article seems to be both making an extremely obvious observation (that the introduction of ULEZ is forcing poor families to get around the city in alternative ways) and missing the fact that such decisions come with both positives and negatives which need to be weighed up. If we simply want to implement policies to benefit children's health then we'd probably be better off banning junk food. But we don't do that because we understand that there are trade-offs. ULEZ has been a disaster for many working families and it's highly unpopular for a reason. If you're poor and don't live in the inner city, or if you don't have a nice middle-class office job and need your car/van for work then ULEZ makes you poorer and your life more difficult.

jojobas 2y ago
Yeah, we should make all achievements of the 20th century prohibitively expensive, that'll show them. The more mobile people will just move out somewhere reasonable, the less mobile will suffer. But that's ok, for adversity brings out inner strength.
- chgs 2y ago
  In the real world demand for housing in London is insatiable. The cheapest borough has an average cost of 10 times the average salary for a house, and it increases from there.
- Earw0rm 2y ago
  So London house prices will crash because it's not affordable to live there? Sounds unlikely tbh, but might not be a bad thing if it did.
- leoedin 2y ago
  Roads with loads of cars are unpleasant. Yes, the car is a great achievement, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strive to have quiet streets too. Ultimately though the ULEZ isn’t even going to affect that. The percentage of cars affected is fairly small and shrinking each year.

MisterBastahrd 2y ago

You want more active kids in the US? This is easy. Every neighborhood needs to have multiple adjacent lots with no construction on it. Aka, a park of sorts. It doesn't need to have slides, or games, or any of that other stuff. It just needs to be an open space with enough room that groups of kids can go and engage in outdoor activities without the need to be constantly monitored by adults. That's it. They can play football or baseball or soccer or frisbee or tag. Doesn't matter. What matters is that you give them the room and let them do their own thing. Not only would this help them be more active, but it'd help them socialize a great deal more than they normally do.

analog31 2y ago
My neighborhood has a big city park just across the street from our house, with a lot of free / empty space. One observation: The kids are too busy to go there, as they're kept occupied by homework and organized extracurriculars.
- LVB 2y ago
  We're seeing (and contributing to, if I'm honest) this parenting mindset that you have to keep kids busy to "keep them out of trouble", thus the schedules get loaded up with organized activities. At least one outcome is that we reached a point where basically none of my kids friends were ever around for just... play. Then our kids are bored, and we'd like them to be doing something with others too, and soon we're signing up them up for activities and the cycle perpetuates.
  - Tade0 2y ago
    I had a culture shock regarding this around a decade ago when my coworker declared (with pride) that his teenage son has his schedule filled up to the brim. I recall thinking how to respond. Was that a good thing? What was he so proud of? Two extracurriculars were already a lot back in my school days. To add to the confusion the kids in my neighbourhood don't seem to attend many classes as I see them on the playground. Is this an upper-middle class thing that I'm supposed to participate in now?

woodpanel 2y ago

As many are pointing out that there is no reduction of actual daily traffic in London I recon that if ULEZ has an effect at all, it is soley caused by the gentrification London's government effectivly creates by increasing the cost of living.

Earw0rm 2y ago
How is walking to school or cleaner air caused by gentrification? If anything it's the other way around - cleaner air making it more desirable to live downtown, leading to higher prices?
rsynnott 2y ago
Really? Have you got data on that? Everything I can find does show a drop, though difficult to disentangle from COVID. And certainly the original congestion charge produced a dramatic drop.

mrcartmeneses 2y ago

The air in London is noticeably cleaner than it used to be. Londoners should be proud of what has been achieved

willvarfar 2y ago
I remember visiting London and doing tourist walky things for a day thirty years ago and blowing my nose and noticing the snot was black. Has that changed?
- mrcartmeneses 2y ago
  Yes as long as you stay off the deeper parts of tube, e.g the Northern Line. One of London’s biggest sources of particulate pollution is now tube train brake pads
- sanswork 2y ago
  That was more of a trip on the underground thing
- martin-adams 2y ago
  You know, I think that has. I remember this happening, but the recent years I’ve been into London on occasion, this doesn’t seem to be a problem anymore.
- taylorius 2y ago
  I'd say so for sure. I've lived in London most of my adult life, and in my experience the air is a lot better than it used to be.
  - input_sh 2y ago
    Evidence: https://aqicn.org/historical#!city:london https://aqicn.org/historical#!city:london Note that this shows Chinese Air Quality Index, which is different than EU AQI, which is different than US AQI, which is different than... you get the point. But at the end of the day they all use the same data.

Rayaan22 2y ago

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w3news 2y ago

Emission zone shouldnt be the issue, it is about the amount of cars and road safety for every user. Check e.g. the Dutch road design, where many kids ride bikes. This is already for decades, and has nothing to do with emission zones. But another road design can also help reducing emissions. It is about how many people can travel safe, and with big cities, you have to reduce cars to increase the amount of people that can travel safe, like bikes, walking, and public transport. Road and city design is very important for a livable city.

Cclayt1123 2y ago
Given the challenges of enforcing strict regulations on emissions, could a market-based approach like a carbon tax be a more effective deterrent for high-emission vehicles and corporate practices?
microtonal 2y ago
This. Though it doesn’t stop at road design. You also have to change the regulations so that car drivers are (partially) legally responsible for accidents, even when a cyclist or pedestrian made the error. Pedestrians and cyclists are orders of magnitude more vulnerable. Putting much more of the legal burden on car drivers makes them more careful. The hard part is that you also need to build a cycling culture. Most car drivers in NL are more mindful of cyclists, because they are cyclists themselves as well. Circling back to road design. In our mid-sized Dutch city, it’s often faster to go from A to B than by bike than by car because of the excellent biking infrastructure and car-free city center. Everything is designed around cycling, some traffic lights will even give bikes a green light more often when it’s raining.
- richardw 2y ago
  I wonder if the flatness of the country plays a part? I live on a hill and am surrounded by hills. A 3km ride in any direction and back is hard work. Lots of e-bikes here, and lots of mountain biking. But when I suggested getting a bike to my SO for her to get to the closest bus stop faster, the hills were the reason why she’d rather walk.

paganel 2y ago

The kids of the well-off getting to play a little bit more because the poors’ cars have been moved out of the city, and this is somehow celebrated. The upper-middle-classes are so out of touch with things that it’s scary.

hkt 2y ago
Maybe you're right. Maybe it is time to ban private cars in London in the name of fairness. That'd be good. Splendid idea!
chgs 2y ago
My 20 year old banger worth half what the scrappage amount is is ulez compliant Of course I good never hope to afford to live in London so I suspect “poor people in London is a myth, or of course those with massively subsidised lives already.
- paganel 2y ago
  For now, give it a couple of years. The very fact that you're thinking about "is my car compliant?" is already a win for them.

BartjeD 2y ago

When I stayed in London half a year ago, we overnighted in the Limehouse area, at the edge / outside of the ULEZ. I can tell from experience there is a big difference in the air. In that area it smelled like exhaust and smog, while the center had no such thing. When I reflect on it, I feel that the less affluent areas have been left out to dry / rot in the exhaust. While the upper class city center is now pristine.

leoedin 2y ago
The ULEZ has covered the entirety of London, including Limehouse, for more than a year. The outer zones of the city are definitely dirtier, but it has less to do with ULEZ and more to do with practical travel times. Despite great public transport, getting between the spokes of the wheel is still a challenge, so people who don’t work in the city centre often drive. The further out you go, the more people like that there are.
chgs 2y ago
Limehouse is way inside the ULEZ, like miles inside.
- philipwhiuk 2y ago
  It is, but East London has had terrible air for years. Cars don't help, but there's lots of sources (City airport for starters)
  - everfrustrated 2y ago
    >for years Centuries in fact. The prevailing wind is from the west so the worst air has always been found in the east.
    - WithinReason 2y ago
      Yes, that's why it's usually the east part of large towns that is the poorer area, and the west is rich.

rsynnott 2y ago

I mean, define ‘surprising’. “We made walking easier and driving more difficult, and now people are walking more. How very surprising!”

PeterStuer 2y ago

Brussels is planning to go EV only by 2035. At this point, there is alost no significant investments in charging capacity. Even worse, landlords are refusing to install charge points in basement garages, presumably because of insurance costs. I'm not against EV at all, even though it is overhyped on the one side and demonized on the other. What bothers me is the hypocrisy in messaging. You can not pretend going full EV in 10 years and not be on a never befote seen giant grid replacement right now. So what is it? Are you going to make car ownership in the city a 1% privilege? Will not much change but will everybody have to pay the exemption fee (oh yes, that exists)? Both can be an acceptable position, just don't pretend.

arghwhat 2y ago
It is true that politicians are not pushing charging infrastructure sufficiently - which they absolutely could, seeing they push other ridiculous and costly requirements like absurd parking space allocations - and that this needs to change. This is unfortunately common in politics. It is far, far cheaper to say things than to do things, and if they can both look good for the people that care about this, and avoid risking annoying anyone that don't care by making proposals they could protest over, then it that ends up being a win-win for them. Politics is unfortunately mainly PR these days. But the reason EVs need to be "overhyped" is because ICE's are not sufficiently demonized to show their true gap. We keep turning our blind eye to ICE's because it is more convenient, and if we keep pretending ICE's are "maybe not great but okay", then EVs have to look ridiculously amazing to show their gap and be worth the infrastructure investment. In reality, EVs are the "okay-ish" baseline, and ICE's should be banished all the way back to the 17th century for anything but very specific commercial applications that currently have no suitable replacement.
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Cthulhu_ 2y ago
Yeah I'm fairly sure both politicians and car manufacturers are dialing back on their EV push; governments' subsidy pots are emptied out, there's no healthy secondhand market yet, and there's heavy competition and/or market dominance (including raw materials and batteries, but also government-assisted low prices) from China. I think that's got politicians nervous. News from Germany is that VW is closing down its German car factories. That's a huge setback. https://www.ft.com/content/f32c172b-d5e9-4397-8831-c61987380e6d https://www.ft.com/content/f32c172b-d5e9-4397-8831-c61987380...

occz 2y ago

This is good, but I wouldn't classify it as surprising - urbanist advocates have been going on about this for years and years. Remove the dangerous and unpleasant elements from the streetscape (cars) and active transportation flourishes (walking, biking, transit).

Mvandenbergh 2y ago

This is a terrible article, written by someone who is either dishonest or doesn't know what they're talking about and has never been to London, covering a paper that appears to be reasonably well done but has some serious limitations. The study is here: https://ijbnpa.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12966-024-01621-7 https://ijbnpa.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12966-024... The data was collected during the 2018/2019 academic year and then during the 2019/2020 academic year (but before the Covid school closures). First, some context: -The original ULEZ, which the referenced study looked at covers central London and should not be confused with the much larger recently expanded ULEZ which covers the whole city. Nor should it be confused with the much smaller congestion charging zone or the larger and older Low Emission Zone which covers freight vehicles. -The ULEZ rules are designed around penalising the driving of the oldest and most polluting vehicles only. In 2019 this was 80% of cars, the expanded ULEZ has overall vehicle compliance of 95%+. As as result of the second point, it would not be expected that it would have a substantial effect on the number of vehicle journeys since 80% of passenger cars in the zone were already compliant anyway, therefore any effect at all is actually surprising. The paper notes a drop of 9% in total vehicle counts. "Four in 10 London children stopped driving and started walking to school a year after the city's clean air zone went into effect." This little quote heads the article. It seems like quite a result, right? It isn't. Let's look at the baselines here, something which immediately anyone who lives in London would be suspicious about because like me their first question would be: "who was driving their kids to school in central London in 2019? Are there enough for there to be four in ten at baseline to switch?". It turns out not many people do, and no. Let's look at table 2 from the paper: (there were about 1000 kids in both the Luton and London samples) At baseline, 856 kids in London travelled using active modes and 105 using inactive modes In Luton that was 599 and 364 respectively So first, we can say that "four in ten children" has to be interpreted pretty carefully here since 85% of kids were already walking to school (note that if they just took the bus the whole way this also counted as walking). At most, we must be talking about changes to the minority of kids who weren't using active travel before, in other words maybe it's that "Four in 10 London children (of the minority who were being driven) started walking to school. But, if we look at the changes, that doesn't quite stack up either. In London: 47 kids switched from active to inactive (all measured based on travel "today" and in many cases there will be variation in modes across days) 44 switched from inactive to active 61 inactive/inactive 809 active/active In Luton: 124 active/inactive 74 inactive/active 290 inactive/inactive 475 active/active It doesn't look like, ignoring the Luton control for the moment, there was any modal shift at all for London! Luton has proportionally shifted away from active transport and only in relative terms to the control has there been a modal shift. This is already a much less positive message. "Kids in general less likely to walk to school, except in London where (potentially due to a low emissions zone) their behaviour didn't change." Where's my four in 10 gone? The "four in 10" comes from the 44 kids who were inactive in the first sample but active in the second (out of 105 total inactive in first sample). Of course that is a much larger % of children from that group who switched in that direction than the 47 who switched the other way from much larger number of first sample actives. If your transition probabilities from A to B are much higher than B to A, but B is much larger group, you can end up in this situation here where you have impressive sounding % changes which nonetheless mean nothing and don't change the population behaviour at all. It's a very fine thing, no doubt, to run multilevel binomial logistic regression models on data and come up with statistically significant odds ratios but I don't think these results remotely justify the news article headline and subhead.

1udsdhoasfih 2y ago

Side-note: in the EU, it is currently surprisingly hard to comply with LEZ. Every state has their own scheme, with information only on third-party websites. Just some examples: * France requires postal pre-registration (they send you a sticker) * in Italy you have to check with each municipality, who at best show you a low-res drawing of the LEZ * (Italy:) Google Maps doesn't know about Low Emission Zones, so it happily sends you through * (Italy, too:) There seem to be very little pedestrian zones. You can drive everywhere, through the Low Traffic Zone might not permit you through. For Google Maps, you can drive everywhere… but you'll end up getting a fine. I'd like to see way more LEZ, but in practice, it is such a mess unfortunately…

tim333 2y ago

As a Londoner in the ULEZ with a car and a bicycle, there were a lot of other changes in that general period to push people away from driving and towards cycling and the like. Blocking streets to cars, removing parking places and the like. I now find with an ebike getting from a to b in the center takes like 1/2 to 1/3 the time as driving - the cars are all stuck in non moving queues at traffic lights.

isaacremuant 2y ago
The ebikes get vandalized like crazy. There's more restrictions on where to park them every day and the cost is prohibitive for lower income users. The green pushes govs perform tend to be a lie that benefit the wealthy and little more. Trains are much more expensive than planes. Tax incentives for expensive electric cars.
- tim333 2y ago
  Well, nothing's perfect. I guess they try to do what they can. I boght my ebike used for £200 which is quite a lot less than a one year bus/tube pass (£1700 zone 1-2) or just the road tax on the car (£360). I'll give you the app based ebikes cost a bit although you can gat monthly passes that are not too bad.

vfclists 2y ago

Roads Were Not Built for Cars - https://roadswerenotbuiltforcars.com/ https://roadswerenotbuiltforcars.com/ There's More To Dutch Roads Than You Think - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4ya3V-s4I0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4ya3V-s4I0

johanneskanybal 2y ago

"Four in 10 London children stopped driving and started walking to school a year after the city's clean air zone went into effect." And think of all the accidents avoided from these guys not driving to school!

galactus 2y ago

How on earth could that be surprising?

chx 2y ago

The daily charge is only for vehicles not meeting the ULEZ standards. For petrol vehicles this means meeting the Euro 4 criteria from 2005, for diesel it means meeting the Euro 6 criteria from 2014. It's hardly a surprise approximately 96% of vehicles are estimated to be ULEZ compliant in Greater London. I think this article is mixing up correlation vs. causation. Funny sidenote: since the ULEZ now covers Heathrow, what's the charge for an Airbus A380?

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