Londoner? ULEZ expansion - wrong time?

[GrubzUp]

I like Sadiq Khan, in general I applaud green initiatives.

However it's been announced today that the original inner London low emission zone is to be expanded into outer London - meaning that if you have an older, more polluting vehicle it will cost you £12.50 every time you drive it anywhere in London (inside the M25 I think).

I live in outer London. There are a LOT of older, non ULEZ compliant vehicles on the road round here. At the moment, people don't need to be compliant for local trips, because unless they're heading inside the North / South Circular Rd, they are fine in their older cars.

I look out in the street and see my neighbours' cars: the people who tend to drive older vehicles are the young, the old, the disabled and the poor.

AIBU to say that hitting them with a big new tax for driving anywhere in the middle of a cost of living crisis is the WRONG time? If they can't afford a newer model they certainly can't afford to pay £12 every time they take it off the drive. I feel bad for these people. How are they going to afford it?

Note that public transport here is not what it is in inner London, you can't just "jump on the tube".

@edwinbear I stopped going to the gym a mile away in the morning because a journey that used to take 15-20 mins started taking 1.5hrs. Sitting in a traffic jam, with stationary buses/vans/lorries pumping out fumes.

You realise that is exactly the point? You could have walked 1 mile in the 20mins it took you to previously drive!

@luxxlisbon yes - I see that, and it’s valid. I tried getting the bus instead, but it too was stuck in grid locked traffic, and I was going around 6am to get back in time to work so whilst I could walk, I really didn’t fancy it. So now I try to walk locally instead for exercise. That’s good. We also dropped from 3 cars to 2 - DH had an old sports car, he loved it, but, we couldn’t justify 3 cars so it’s gone. That’s good too.

But - 13yr old DS plays rugby, we have a fantastic, diverse squad from all sorts of backgrounds. The kids have a match early Sunday morning in Maidstone. Pre-ULEZ, most parents had a car they could use to get there. Now, over half the squad don’t have access to a car, (they had to sell their older cars and couldn’t afford to replace), obviously it’s the less well off kids who don’t. We try to lift share as best we can, but the reality is, it’s the least well off kids who are reliant on a lift to get there. They will be the ones missing out because they can’t play.

What about that massive mountain of rubbish thats been around for years, is it in Orpington, at the end of a cul de sac thats made people ill for years.

How is the air around that these days?

If he cared about pollution and the environment he would be encouraging less building and instead establishing more green spaces.

London is overdeveloped. We need green spaces, not concrete, but parks don't pay, so Sadiq can't be arsed.

This has just finished me off today. I have no extra money right now, I need my car for work my car has lost so much in value. I just seriously give up with everything right now. I cannot see an end to the constant worry of just surviving.

This constant rule changing boils me piss. I don’t want to continually change my car to suit the latest government whim and the one time I did try and do what they wanted it’s massively bitten me on the arse. I bought a new (to me) car back in 2016. I had two similar cars in my price range, one was a diesel and one a hybrid. The premium for the hybrid was that I had to buy 6 months older to match the price of the diesel. I thought this would be the right choice, it crawls on the motor so no emissions in queueing traffic.

Jump forward to the ULEZ and it’s all done on diesel euro standards, because of the 6 month age difference this meant the diesel engine in the hybrid is euro 5 whereas the full diesel would have been euro 6. So if I’d bought the more polluting car in situations like crawling through central London I’d not be paying the ULEZ but because the bit of the car it needs to drive up the M6 is older it’s £12.50 a time.

And don’t even get me started on the fact it’s midnight to midnight. I often end up on jobs overnight in London whereby I travel in at 9pm and out again at 3am. Traffic levels and congestion and therefore overall pollution is way lower at this time, only it’s now £25 a time, but drive in at 1am and you can do full day of driving around for £12.50. So yes it does feel like a punitive tax rather than actually having any bearing on the environmental impact it relates to, and in reality the costs for this just get passed on to our customers and at the end of the chain it will be average Joe paying more.

It will be a nightmare for air quality, they create hugely problematic pollution. They ought to be banned.

Do you hear yourself? Rural areas measure their public transport provision in terms of the number of services (not necessarily plural) per day, not per hour. 2tph is a perfectly adequate service to plan your life around.

I'm astonished by the number of outer Londoners on this thread saying that because they don't get a bus every three minutes like you might in zone 1 they couldn't possibly use public transport.

I’m sorry that you’re one of the unfortunate victims of the scheme I have nothing else to offer

If he cared about pollution and the environment he would be encouraging less building and instead establishing more green spaces

@ChardonnaysBeastlyCat but we have a chronic issue with affordable housing. We have to build houses so people have somewhere to live - surely? I’m not saying I know the answer, but I do see this as an issue in London. I’d prefer my kids had a few less parks, if it means other kids had a decent home.

Do you actually know anything about the sustainability or green elements to the London Plan?

Most of the traffic is due to the endless construction sites. Vans, delivery lorries and so on.

But Sadiq Khan encourages construction, so we all pay the price in pollution and money.

I don't care what the plan says. I know what I can see. Every square inch on my way to work to covered in concrete and new builds, same where I live. Thousand more people and flats.

But yes, there is a green element in the plan so it's all fine.

So only a grace period for disabled drivers and not an exemption? Plus, as PP said, many disabled people have no choice but to go for a very large car - which are almost always diesel and significantly more expensive?

Good to see them clamping down on these pesky people and their selfish desire for the independence they need to live their lives; I wonder which other less-privileged minority will be next.

Remember the trees he was going to plant on Oxford street? Quickly forgotten, even though they were in the Manifesto.

Green, my arse.

It was cleared years ago.

@TeresaCrowd that sounds immensely annoying!

I hope the Range Rover he gets chauffeured around in is compliant. Makes my blood boil.

A plan to plant trees on Oxford street or plans to pedestrianise the street, which ultimately was stopped by Westminster Council?

I lived in central London for years and now outer London where the responsibility for speed limits and road design rests with the council. The place is a pit compared to in a inner borough. Literally no investment in anything that would reduce pollution, speed limits, and endless moaning about the idea that doing anything about pollution is communism. The evidence is that schemes like ULeZ and LTNs work. Regulation on the basis of emissions is the only way to change things for our children and the future. Driving is a privilege not a right and if your car is polluting the air beyond a safe level then get rid of it. This is coming whether you like it or not. 12.50 will go up to discourage seriously polluting vehicles. Good. The air in outer London can be utterly disgusting and inner London has improved.

If it doesn't reliably get you to the station on time then get the earlier bus. It's only fifteen minutes earlier. It's not like Thameslink is a particularly sparse service once you do get to the station. In some places near me, if you miss a train it's three hours until the next one.

I assume that "4 buses a day to the station" was an autocorrect error, because I've just checked and from Biggin Hill there are frequent bus services to several different stations.

To plant thousands of trees. Which he promised and then dropped.

I must admit that I had long taken the piss out of Americans for driving ridiculously short distances to go to the gym (at least one of which had an escalator to get you from the car park to the gym itself). Evidently it's more widespread than that.

I never said I didn't catch it. I use public transport 6 times a working day!. If it's 2 miles or less away, I walk. I leave the house at 6.30 am, to get to work at 8 30 am. Trains are being 'rationalised' too (less of them).

I wouldn't walk the cat to the vet, two miles away though. And I take a disabled family member out at the weekends, and he's not so hot on walking.

And I don't take a Thameslink train once at the station.