UK’s first emissions zone begins
Now here is an idea I would like to see adopted here.
The most heavily polluting lorries are facing charges of £200 per day to enter Greater London as Britain’s first low emission zone (LEZ) comes into force.
The £49m scheme uses cameras to check all lorries over 12-tonnes entering the zone against a database of vehicles certified as meeting EU exhaust limits.
The emissions zone is much bigger than the congestion charge zone. London lies in a basin with low hills to the north and south. So bad air tends to fill up the bowl, and despite clean air legislation introduced in the 1950s, the growth of internal combustion engine use has meant that air quality is getting worse. And since the industry and the port shut down and moved away, transport contributes half of of the air pollution.
Here our air quality is pretty good - on the whole. Off shore breezes ensure that most of our activity’s by-products blow up the valley, where the AQ is markedly worse. But along the routes used by heavy duty trucks (I love seeing that word “lorries” again, but I won’t use in deference to our location) diesel particulates do make the air dangerous to breathe. There is a very distinct bell curve that transects Knight Street for instance.
Missing from the Gateway strategy is any action to deal with pollution. We are expected to put up with a lot more shipping - and ships have the worst standards and little enforcement, and sit running their engines while at anchor - and a lot more trucks too. You cannot put a heavy truck through an AirCare station - in fact last time I looked the only equivalent test rig for heavy duty vehicles was in Ottawa. AirCare On Road is better than nothing, but seems very low profile to me.
BBC transport correspondent Tom Symonds says other UK towns and cities with pollution problems will be watching the implementation of the LEZ with interest.
I hope someone here does too.
