Clean air, clean water, clean food, clean bottoms, what's not to like?
No sensible person would argue against such things, but the air quality and the need to drive less polluting vehicles isn't the problem for me, its the way it's been implemented.
Khan, when asked, said that he had no plans to expand the original ULEZ zone.....then he got reelected and.... suprise suprise!
I haven't followed it very closely but I believe he had a decent public mandate for the first ULEZ? As far as I'm aware, there was a public consultation on expanding it up to the North & South Circulars, between May and July of 2022? He certainly pledged in his re-election campaign to expand it to (but not including) the North & South Circulars. I also think his re-election manifesto contained the pledge:
"“Beyond the expansion of ULEZ, I’ll monitor all existing road-charging schemes to ensure they continue to bring the maximum benefits of improved air quality and reduced congestion, and I’ll identify where further action is needed to eradicate hotspots for air pollution.”
He represents everything I hate about politicians, he's certainly no worse than a Tory.
He is a lying, sneaky POS, if he really cared about air quality he would've just banned the older vehicles outright. We are supposed to be worrying about the health of the little kiddies, the same ones who spend all their time sucking on vapes, hanging around fast food shops and stabbing each other? There are other priorities!
I think the point is that they get to choose whether or not they want to vape or eat crap food, whereas they don't get the choice of what air to breathe? Also, as far as I'm aware, it's not only children who are vulnerable, it's also the elderly. I agree there's a degree of hypocrisy in not banning vehicles over 40 years old though.
There are so many ways they could have done this, road space rationing would probably reduce daily emissions just by reducing the amount of time that vehicles spent sitting idle in traffic. The ULEZ expansion certainly hasn't reduced congestion on London roads.
That does suggest that enough people seem to have ULEZ-compliant vehicles for it not to have visibly reduced the number of vehicles? In any case, they tend not to make much by way of NOx or particulates when sat in traffic.
He could've given a decent timeframe for ULEZ to come into place, less than a year is not long enough for people to replace their older vehicles, all it did was drive up the price of second hand cars!
The price of second hand cars went up anyway, nationally, not just in London, because off the shortage of new vehicles, this last few years.
A three year window and a more generous scrappage scheme would've been much less traumatic.
How would the scrappage scheme have been funded?
People were and are paying silly money for ULEZ compliant but high mileage vehicles, that will probably need replacing sooner rather than later. This whole scheme has become very expensive for the motorist, and very wasteful. Perfectly good condition and well maintained vehicles getting crushed, for a fraction of their original value. Madness! (Not to mention all those expensive cameras that have been cut down and chucked in the river....raise a glass for the blade runners )
I won't even go into the air quality on the London Underground...
Why should the vehicles have been crushed? Surely they could have been sold outside of London?
