Do you support the ULEZ expansion?

[icecream99]

Just curious as it is due to start at midnight tonight and could potentially cause a lot of chaos. I don't support it.

YANBU - I DON'T support ULEZ expansion

YABU - I DO support ULEZ expansion

I support the expansion because dirty air= death and suffering.

All my life I have lived and worked inside the original ulez area or now inside the expansion area. We have a small family business and have one only-just non compliant van, by a year, that we can’t afford to replace. Many multiples of the scrappage payment would be needed to replace it. So we will save up as best we can and pay the charge every day it goes off the driveway.

So yes, it’s an absolute pain in the arse but yes, it’s also absolutely the right thing to do. I will vote for Khan again.
Agree that everything is so expensive though so we really need to work on the cost of living (housing, food, transport etc) and need to improve public transport for the whole of London which is not just a London Mayor thing but it is also a national government thing. So I really want to see them working together more.

So use your vote carefully- the past 13 years have taken us to being a struggling economy worse than neighbouring countries so I don’t think the answer can be for us to keep on voting for Christmas like turkeys.

Definitely support. We live near the boundary of the orginal ULEZ expansion and the world hasn't fallen in, businesses haven't failed, we still get tradesmen.

Something has to be done about air pollution - if this was a new virus killing people and damaging children's health in the same numbers people would be howling for government action.

I get the concerns about the "stick" of the £12.50 charge but sadly that is what it often takes for people to change their behaviour.

I've been in the original zone for years and could really tell the difference when I drove out into other areas. The fumes coming out of exhausts and just generally shitty cars.

Round here all the white vans seem to be new anyway. We are always saying look how dirty and scratched that van is and its only a 22 plate.

The camera infrastructure was already in place for the LEZ which applies to lorries and was introduced over ten years ago. The computer system to charge the daily fees was set up for the existing smaller ULEZ and the congestion charge.

Hence the cost of changing the footprint for the ULEZ was just the signage and a mail shot. Not free, but all the really expensive stuff was piggybacked on pre-existing projects.

That's why it goes all the way out so far. It's caused huge political angst and something smaller would probably have been easier to justify, but implementing a halfway house expansion between the old ULEZ zone and the LEZ zone would have been really expensive.

The thing is, shops and other businesses in urban areas tend to get better and more reliable custom from people living locally (either car-free or one-car-per-household) in the city center, and who do stuff on foot/bike in their local urban neighborhood…. Rather than people living on the outskirts of cities, who SAY “If you make it easy for me to drive my car into the center of town I’ll drive in there and spend money there!”but in practice they actually don’t do this very often and they mostly just hang out at home and go to out-of-town shopping centers/out-of-town big-box stores and shop online.

Cities are generally (I’m sure there are exceptions; there is more than one way to run a city) better off designing urban areas around the needs of local walking/biking/PT-using local residents and building lots of dense housing there, rather than designing urban areas around cars/driving/parking and then sort of hoping/praying that the suburbanites WILL actually drive in and revive the high street like they keep promising they will.

Ahh, that explains it. Of course you would support ANY charge on motorists.

How fortunate that you're able to cycle everywhere. Most people don't have that luxury and rely on their cars to get to work, school(s), hospitals with elderly relatives. How do you manage to do all that on a bike?

As someone who uses roads to go everywhere, have you considered paying £12.50 a day for their upkeep? No. Didn't think so.

ULEZ is not addressing climate change, it's (if it works) about cleaning up the air in cities.
If everyone switches to compliant vehicles, that will create an increase in Co2 emissions, not a decrease, both from the emissions of manufacture and recycling, but also moving to more petrol cars actually increases co2 per mile/km as they are not as efficient as diesels in co2 emissions.

I need to add if TFL or Team Sadiq are reading this, that cycling isn’t always an option for urban residents who want to use a bike. Loads of converted houses to flats and many purpose built flats don’t have anywhere secure to store bicycles and you have to pay a lot and go on a waiting list for the council rented secure bike sheds which often aren’t located where the flats are. So that needs to be part of the joined up thinking too.

I agree; there’s probably a need for more bike hangars (although I do think that these should be a last resort as they are not the prettiest things and they detract from one of the biggest benefit of discouraging vehicles - that you no longer have huge lumps of metal blocking every pavement!).

Why does everyone blame Sadiq Khan? ULEZ expansion was forced by the Conservative government – it was made a precondition of funding for TfL, which went into financial crisis because of Covid. It wasn't Khan's idea; it was Grant Shapps's. It's disgusting that the government is attacking Khan for something it made him do.

No. Pure money making scheme.

Bike hangars go on the road not the pavement though- they go in road spaces where a car would otherwise have been parked?

There’s also the issue that many business and office spaces don’t support bike commuting into town with secure bike storage either so this whole area needs looking at.

I’ll never vote Labour again. Khan is a lying crook. Same as the rest of them really, but him and his cronies will never get my vote again.

YANBU for the following reasons:
New cars, even EV’s take 125000 miles of driving before their manufacturing C02 cost is negated
The money paid to the ULEZ scheme is ONLY used to pay for the ULEZ scheme
There has been no scheme to reduce Carbon emissions by planting trees in London, which would do more to clean the air than any other measures, ULEZ included
The air quality in London is at its worst on the Tube network
Very few measures have been explored to encourage greater use of public transport
Electric scooters (stand-on) have been banned, instead of new regulations for their use been considered
Infrastructure supporting alternative means of transport have not been put in place

ULEZ is a wholly punitive tax, introduced by Khan, as a vanity project. He hasn’t done anything to reduce emissions by increasing access to public transport or alternative means of transport, and he needs to be stopped. Vote him out, Londoners!

Many of the compliant vehicles people switch to will be hybrids or EVs. Yes there’s the manufacture emissions but let’s not argue that British people hang onto their cars until they fall apart. Having the 23 plate is ingrained in some people’s souls.

Fewer diesels will decrease NOx emissions and this can only be a good thing.

Trees

https://www.london.gov.uk/programmes-strategies/environment-and-climate-change/parks-green-spaces-and-biodiversity/trees-and-woodlands/trees-london

I like the idea of the ULEZ but don’t like how it was implemented. Wasn’t given enough information or notice to those affected, it came alongside several other new costs (TFL fare changes, Blackwell tunnel toll etc) and seems a bit hypocritical as Sadiq himself drives a big Range Rover everywhere.

There will be lots of gnashing of teeth about it but I've seen it all before with the congestion charge, original LEZ etc. I'll still give Khan my vote.

They are looking at that.

BBC article: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-64788470
Restriction on woods that can be sold: https://www.london.gov.uk/programmes-and-strategies/environment-and-climate-change/pollution-and-air-quality/guidance-wood-burning-london
New building guidance:

This report suggests quite a big impact for ULEZ in Central London. https://www.london.gov.uk/programmes-and-strategies/environment-and-climate-change/environment-publications/air-quality-london-2016-2020

If you have reports that show minimal impact, that would be really interesting to read.

@WhenLifeGivesYouLimes it's simply not true to say all the cameras were already in place.

There are literally dozens of new cameras that have sprung up near me in the last few weeks

@mrandmrsrobinson Who the fuck drives in to central London to go to events? You already have to lay the origianl ULEZ charge (if your car is non compliant) and the congestion charge for any car.

Large events and concert venues in London have very good public transport links. It is usally better and quicker to use those anyway. I still seeth at the "helpful" friends who insisted my friend and i a lift back from Wembly Arena - we felt like we had to accept - it took over an hour to leave the car park and then they dumped us on North London (we live in South London) "as we don't want to get home too late."

It is true to say the the original (city-centre) ULEZ was a conservative policy. And other clean air zones have been introduced in UK cities, some by Conservative councils, I believe.

The difference is that none of the other clean air zones extend beyond the city centres (as far as I am aware). They certainly don't extend right out to the furthest suburbs, semi-rural areas, and completely different towns, against the wishes of the local county councils that actually run those towns!

The way this has been rolled out, and the barefaced lies told to justify it, are what I take issue with.

Why do you assume that something working in Central London is relevant to areas with a totally different air profile and transport provision?

You might just as well use Central London figures to justify expansion to teh whole country (or use the figures from the tiny ULEZ zone in Birmingham to justify expansion across the whole of the West Midlands).