£35.50 to take a car into London 😲

[whatdoidonowffs]

Confirmed the Blackwall tunnel and the new Silvertown tunnel will become toll tunnels in 2025
£4 per crossing 😡😡 add that to the congestion and ULEZ charge hardly worth going to work !!

And what about when they leave?

The guy who fitted our kitchen lives in the ULEZ zone. Most of the jobs he does are outside the ULEZ zone and not easily accessible by public transport. It's not just people working in London who are affected by the charges.

That includes Worthing and little Hampton! My point is the same though. There are lots of people living in the congestion zone and it is irritating to be dismissed as irrelevant. You can compare it to Oxford or Exeter.

No, it’s just the people in the ULEZ zone who drive non compliant vehicles. How might that be fixed, hmm…?

But it’s been going since 2003! Honestly, the residents are over it by now.

Yes, but in believe that’s the point? To keep traffic out, lower pollution, and keep cars that don’t conform to Ulez standards in particular, out?
London has fantastic public transport too…

I guess someone has to pay for maintaining that awful tunnel! It’s in pretty dire condition

Either you pay up - or you face longer delays because it becomes unusable and needs rebuilding completely!

How many of the people living in the CC zone have cars? Where on earth are they parking them?

The ULEZ can be avoided by buying a ULEZ compliant vehicle. The vast majority of vehicles are already ULEZ compliant anyway. There is a Mayor of London scrappage scheme for vans with a grant offered to buy a new compliant one. Our car isn’t compliant and we plan to apply for the car scrappage scheme.

In underground car parks or residential parking bays. We also have to pay the congestion charge for lots of deliveries and tradesmen driving in to do work on property. If there are so few people living in the zone, as people seem to be arguing, why aren’t they exempt? I don’t care that much but I don’t want to be told that I’m irrelevant.

Residents are not fully exempt from the congestion charge but they only pay 10%.

Or you could opt for a ULEZ compliant car, of course, and help stop pollution.

@Gogogo12345 they are gone before 7am.

For most commercial vehicles their workplace pays for it.

As people have said it is is to limit traffic and congestion, something which actually benefits business and drivers.

I love the CC, and ULEZ, I can drive my huge Ranger Rover into town without being held up by poor people in their old bangers...

So he either gets a ULEZ compliant van, or he parks the van outside the ULEZ and commutes to it by public transport. Surely the great Free Market should be rushing to provide secure parking for tradespeople outside the ULEZ? - because if we can't rely on it to do that, we sure as shit can't rely on it to improve air quality and lower emissions in a regulation-free free-for-all.

I worked in central London for nearly 20 years, living in zones 2-3 all that time and working in big busy offices. Nobody I ever worked with would dream of trying to drive into work. As others have said, there are no car parks, and anyway, who wants to sit in traffic for 2 hours plus in the morning rush hour instead of spending 20-30 mins on the train or tube, or a little longer on a bus (which is much quicker than a car as it uses bus lanes)? I didn’t even own a car for the vast majority of the time I lived in London, and this was far from unusual for my type of well paid middle class office worker.

Not long before I left I did meet that rare creature, someone who lived in a very naice bit of zone 2 and drove to work every day. He was nearly 70, had a lovely comfy Jag, and had for decades worked as a senior solicitor in a firm somewhere just off Oxford Street where he’d managed to hang on like grim death to his parking space. But I still remember that conversation years later because it struck me as so unusual a thing to do and him as such a throw-back.

@jannier he can pass the ULEZ fee onto his customers as most trades do.

Lives in and around London for 30 years…
I have probably driven into central London half a dozen times in all house years! And on Sundays…
I have never met or worked with anyone who commutes into central London by car… even when I lived in zone3/4 I didn’t know anyone who even owned a car.
Why on earth anyone would want to drive regularly in central London is beyond me, use the tube! Or overground or bus or taxis …

So this was just a shit stirring post as the OP hasn't come back. Nobody really cares about the ULEZ or anything else. Even Uxbridge voted Labour.

‘The guy who fitted our kitchen lives in the ULEZ zone. Most of the jobs he does are outside the ULEZ zone and not easily accessible by public transport. It's not just people working in London who are affected by the charges.’

its paid parking on our street, builders, workers etc roll the cost into the work that they’re doing …

I also live in London and have only once driven into central - because I got lost. Other than trades, I don't know anyone who drives to work!

Oh yes, and the air pollution. I lived in zone 1 for a year as a student, before the congestion charge, in a top floor flat high above the streets of central London. In the summer if I had the windows open for ventilation I subsequently had to scrub the walls down as the magnolia paintwork went black with the pollution. I still wonder what my years of living in or near central London did to my long term health.

London has amazing transport networks, for more like £13 per day, use those long pointy things that have the flat bits at the end (which move backward and forward). We have very polluted air, that’s what the charge is for.

Exactly - real Londoners don’t drive into the centre. It’s pointless, expensive and pollutes our air. ULEZ is a deterrent. Rightly so.

Those who think tradespeople should not have to pay Ulez/CC (or that Ulez/CC should be scrapped to ensure that no tradesperson has to pay it), should anyone belonging to a trade also get free public transport when they are using that? Because to be logical and consistent, that's what you'd have to do.

Come to think of it, why stop there? Perhaps anyone belonging to something defined as a trade should be allowed to fill up a trolley from the supermarket for free, get a free house from the government, free flights to go on holiday...

Controversial opinion: People who work as builders or plumbers are not actually better or worse than people who work in other jobs. They are not some kind of salt-of-the-earth bollocks, they are not providing services as a charity. They are just people doing a job. And it is OK to ask people doing a job, any job, to please pay for the things they use. That includes road space, which is a limited commodity. Or public transport if they are using that.

Society should do things to make sure that people who work in trades can do their jobs comfortably, safely and easily (and one of the THE most important things they can do in that regard, BTW, is to limit congestion and parking pressure so that tradespeople do not spend half their lives stuck in traffic jams). Society is not, however, under any obligation to give tradespeople stuff (such as modes of travel) for free which other working people are not getting for free.