Whilst it’s true that the intention to expand the zone could have been publicised more widely and earlier, it’s a fact that the air quality in our major cities is bad and getting worse as traffic increases. It’s a major health hazard.
The petrolheads obviously don’t much care about that and, of course, the fact that London’s mayor is not only a brown-skinned Muslim but also from the Labour Party has the right-wing press and their readers foaming at the mouth and calling for his head on a spike. The Tories are hoping for a boost to their poor support (on all other matters they are behind) in London constituencies.
The ULEZ Whingers are the same sort of people who whinged when speed limits were first introduced, whinged when MOT tests were made mandatory, whinged when wearing seat belts became mandatory.
In an article I’ve just read from Auto Express the writer said disgruntled drivers like him would be boycotting London’s roads, rather than paying the £12.50-a-day charge. Surely that’s exactly what the purpose of expanding the zone is, you muppet!
Less traffic, compliant or non-compliant, is something to be looked forward to, I think.
Bet your boots the leaders of all the other major cities are going to be watching how the ULEZ expansion works out, with a view to doing likewise at a later date.
ULEZ Whingers.
by 48 Comments
I support the need for it, but can’t necessarily get the venom about it.
As far as I can tell (and I may be wrong) but the majority of vehicles registered after Jan 2006 (Petrol) and June 2016 (Diesel) are compliant and won’t be charges the £12.50 in the expanded zone.
But … there is a line in the blurb that says:
When driving through the Ultra Low Emission Zone, ULEZ charges will apply unless you are in one of the above vehicles. However, you may still be charged if you have failed to inform TfL that you are driving a ULEZ-compliant vehicle.
So best to check and register I suppose.
Then again, I live in Reading (now on the TfL Tube Map by virtue of the Elizabeth Line) and if I go into that London, I’ll be training it
(although I do have to go to Heathrow in a couple of weeks, so better inform
Big BrotherTfL of my intentions)From the TFL website:
“Most vehicles don’t need to register with us because we already know if they meet the emissions standards for the Low Emission Zone (LEZ) and the Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ).
Register your vehicle with us if:
It is listed by us as NOT meeting LEZ/ULEZ emissions standards but you can provide evidence that it does
You are a showman with a modified or specially constructed vehicle.”
So, unless you are indeed a “showman”, you don’t need to tell them you’re coming to visit…
Note to self (1): read all the text
Note to self (2): investigate career change opportunities to be a showman
(for no other reason than achieving ULEZ exemption)
It’s a tax on poor people. It’s not actually scientifically proven to tackle the problem either. And massively undemocratic for those on the borders of London
It’s just to raise money as TFL are screwed by falling revenues after Covid.
End result of course might be slightly cleaner air which no one would argue is a bad thing. But the policy could be implemented better.
The crocodile tears Tory MPs are shedding on behalf of poor people with old cars would be a lot more convincing if their government hadn’t already been making life difficult for poor people with old cars for 13 years.
Indeed, the Tories have done many things to hurt the poor. Pity that a Labour mayor does the same
Hmmm…well these poor people are being bunged 2 grand to get rid of their old cars – old being registered before 2005. A quick search of Exchange and Mart comes up with loads of small cars – Clios, C3s, 208s etc – from around 2010 for less than 3 grand. 9 out of 10 cars already on the road are already compliant. Keeping a pre-2005 car on the road is probably quite costly already. Obviously there will be exceptions, like dkhbrit’s sister below, but perhaps they can be identified and given special help. And the fewer shitty old diesel vans charging round the streets of greater London the better.
Full disclosure: the 1998 Toyota Hill 2.7L I rattle round Murwillumbah in will be headed for the scrap heap if they bring ULEZ in here. I can guarantee I’ll grumble, but I won’t be manning the barricades.
On the subject of diesel vans, my 2015 VW Crafter is Euro 5 and has 75k miles and is good for another 75k. I’m not in London that often these days so I won’t be changing it, especially as I’m planning on downsizing the business in a year so hopefully won’t need it. If I was driving in a few times every week, I’d get a Euro 6, if I could. Supply of new and nearly new vans was very poor last time I looked and of course the prices of low mileage, 1 year old vans have gone through the roof.
Electric vans have a long way to go yet. A friend got excited about replacing his van with electric. Checked the claimed ranges and borrowed a dealer’s demo vehicle for the day. He’s able to plug in at one his clients forecourts when working there but despite being within the claimed range and charging for two hours before starting home, he only just made it. He’s sticking with his diesel Transit at the moment. I also know of a company that bought the Transit Petrol Hybrid but found it completely unsuited to any distance so they don’t bother charging it, just run it on petrol.
I’m broadly in favour of the charge, while admitting that I’m not helping by keeping the Crafter on the road although I think there should be more help for the disabled who rely on cars.
funny how people get upset about policies weighted against poor people when it comes to expensive cars, and not, say, the two child benefit cap or anything like that
The really poor people are the ones dying of respiratory issues because they can’t afford a car. Because they’re waiting for a bus on a congested main road, or walking along that main road because they can’t afford the bus fare that day.
Totally agree that it hasn’t been implemented well at all, but ULEZ is needed.
I haven’t driven in London for years but my experience with taxis and buses there in recent years is pretty much always the same: long, solid line of traffic, lots of traffic lights. Each time they go green, the line shifts forward three cars, then stops again. Repeat to fade. Why would anyone want to join that/be upset to lose that? Terrible way of getting around. (Yes, I know some people won’t have any choice in the matter.)
It might help more if they just stopped building skyscrapers for a while, then there’d be fewer lorries/cement mixers/cranes/closed roads to screw it up for everyone else. Add ULEZ to that and it could turn into a (very expensive) paradise.
Madrid’s a breeze in comparison (hardly a lorry in sight during the day which I suspect is fairly key). People bomb down the main avenue the Castellana at 80 kmh – I should stress, this isn’t a good thing – with hardly a care in the world outside of rush hour, liberated once they’ve escaped the jams getting in, and rushing to escape the jams getting out. But London is just one big jam. Everywhere.
PS. Madrid also has pretty reliable and affordable public transport which doesn’t hurt. And we also mostly live in flats rather than suburban semis so the city doesn’t stretch out to such endless proportions in every direction.
My sister and her husband had a vehicle perfect for them. Not the best for the environment but it allowed wheelchair access which they need. They just had to borrow money to replace it because of the ULEZ expansion into Middlesex. It’s ridiculous.
The Tories won Uxbridge by lying to people that it applied to everyone and let them think that included electric cars and as usual the dim electorate fell for it. Labour dropped the ball by turning on the policy rather than explaining it and talking about smoothing the implementation. Dismal all round.
I used to live and cycle round central London from 1998 to 2004. I hated the private car. It took up space, both when parked by the pavement and parked in traffic (more often than not with just one person in it). It was dangerous for pedestrians and cyclists. The air pollution, particularly on the routes into King’s Cross, was terrible. Cities used to be shared between different road users before car companies conspired to buy up and sell off tram routes and managed to land grab large tranches of cities for their exclusive use, leaving pedestrians channeled into narrow pavement areas. Anything that makes it harder and more inconvenient to drive a private car in urban areas is fine by me, as long as effective public alternatives are introduced. It was a real blessing when the road route in front of the National Gallery was closed.
I’m glad to live in Bonn, where cars have been completely banned from the centre of the city for decades and the current Green mayor is introducing more cycle/ pedestrian only routes, for example along the Rhine.
It’s not personally a problem for me, but then I’m not struggling with the cost of living and/or reliant on getting into London for work via a non compliant motor.
I’m broadly in favour of the policy, but I think it’s important to recognise that it’s requiring further sacrifice from some people who are already struggling to make ends meet, and that those people have a right to disagree without being inferred to be racist and/or whingers. There are some legit downsides/costs to this policy, noble as it’s intention may be, we should be real about that.
It’s a good excuse to post this though.
I’m happy to be corrected if I’m wrong about this but wasn’t the first ULEZ introduced by Boris Johnson when he was mayor? I can’t quite understand why this hasn’t been mentioned much in the current furore.
The BBC mention that fact in every article on ULEZ on their news site.
As far as “a tax on poor people” goes, just about every UK tax that there has ever been impacts poor people more severely than any others, because our tax system is designed by and for the rich. Really poor people in cities don’t have cars. They can’t afford them. They use buses and bicycles, but the roads are choked with better-off people’s cars.
The reason the middle classes and the skilled workers can’t afford the ULEZ charge on top of everything else, is because the current government, normally very protective of them, have royally fucked it all up and have abandoned them.
Virtually all petrol cars with catalytic converters should be ULEZ-compliant if the Cat is doing what it’s supposed to. Diesels are more of a problem. They were touted as being less-polluting and that was a blatant lie. I know my 21-year-old petrol-engined car is on the Compliant list*, but I’d never even consider driving it into Central London. Haven’t done so in the last 15 years or so. Currently, Brent Cross or around Golders Green are as far into town as I’m prepared to venture and even then only of an evening or on a Sunday.
I used to have to drive all over town in a diesel van in my working life and it was horrible. Some days I spent more time in traffic than I did actually working and month by month I observed it getting worse and worse. Driving in London eats your soul. Meanwhile just about every 17-18 year old suburban Londoner/Home Counties dweller aspires to car ownership. Just count the driving school cars you see on the back roads of the suburbs. I counted 13 on one 2-mile NW7 work journey once.
Public transport in London is being deliberately starved of funding, for political reasons, by our present government. They want TfL to fail as a means of ousting mayor Sadiq Khan.
* 2002 Saab 93 Turbo Convertible. I imagine it’s resale value, should I choose to part with it, has gone up a fair bit in the past few weeks.
@Steve-Walsh
I take it as an encouraging sign of the speed with which Johnson
Is descending into irrelevance and hopefully obscurity
Yes, this is conveniently being forgotten by most of the whingers. And if I’m not mistaken, this enlargement was originally proposed by that well-known muslim communist Grant Shapps.
What’s ULEZ? Congestion zone?
Ultra Low Emission Zone. Different from the congestion charge.
Ok thanks
Basically you get shafted twice on the same journey.
Ignore the original post – dislike of Sadiq Khan is nothing to do with racism and more to do with the fact that he is inept and couldn’t run a piss up in a brothel.
As pointed out further up the thread the benefits to the environment are nowhere near as great as he would leave you to believe.
I am neither poor nor own a vehicle that would incur the charge but feel this is an ill thought out scheme that penalises the wrong people. The tax on fuel, road tax, the tax for buying a car should all be used to introduce emission reduction schemes – why make the poor citizens of London pay more than the rest of the nation when they are already paying astronomical rents etc. It is complete bollocks and a revenue generating scam. Nothing more nothing less.
ULEZ or something very similar will be coming to Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Manchester, Liverpool etc. before long.
Wait and see.
What makes you think Sadiq Khan’s performance as mayor is any worse than Boris Johnson’s?
Maybe not you, Steve, but dislike of Khan has EVERYTHING to do with racism in many quarters. The fact that he’s a Muslim doesn’t go down well with these people either. What makes you think he couldn’t run a pissup in a brothel? He seems to be doing a decent enough job.
I’m sure all the politicians and commentators, who mouth off about how Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion protesters should be locked up, will soon be equally vocal about the criminals who are destroying ULEZ infrastructure.
It’s a bit like those redneck fundamentalists in the US who are against abortion but pro the death penalty
Not only was it it introduced by Boris Johnson, but I read somewhere that a couple of years ago Grant Shapps was encouraging its expansion and even suggesting the congestion charge was applied to outer London, which would have been much more onerous. This is pure political opportunism and does the Tories no credit, and I do wonder if it may be counter productive. ULEZ has not been controversial up until now, and wonder how the encouragement of vandalism by a few hotheads goes down with more moderate,law abiding Tory voters who actually want cleaner air.
Exactamundo.
It’s a husk of the end of a straw the Tories are grasping at – the only thing which has given them any traction in months though as I said above, Labour dropped the ball. Rishi “the motorist’s friend” nobly defending the right of people with highly polluting cars to bring them into London.
Rishi is appealing to the same constituency that sit outside my house twice a day in their L200s, Evoques and Vogues, fiddling illegally with their mobile phones, with their windows up and their engines on ‘for the air-con’ while they wait for Jemima and Torquil to emerge from their Primary School and walk the 25 yards back to the bosom of their entitled, stupid, selfish parents.
Exactly.
Is the government pooling all the fines and using the money to supply replacement cars for the needy?
In North Wales a couple of local dual carriageway bypasses have had their speed limit lowered to 50 to improve air quality, but zero emission cars are also subject to the fine. I imagine the traffic enforcement officers would have a field day in their diesel off roaders pursuing a Tesla at 60 to issue the ticket.
We’re about to have our 30mph zones lowered to 20 mph. Could we meet in the middle at 25 if pedestrians agree to look up from their phones, remove headphones and lower their hoodies?
I don’t belieeeeeeeeve it!
Our village is already a 20 mph zone throughout the heart of the place. Drivers routinely pass through at a minimum of 25 mph, with many north of 40 mph. We don’t need to raise the speed limit, we need to prosecute the bastards who flout the existing limit.
Yes, there’s not much point in a limit unless it’s enforced. I suspect that’s one of the reasons why ‘zones’ are popular with the powers that be. ‘Just’ stick up cameras on all roads at the edge of the zone and let the computers do the rest.
I guess in years to come, the ULEZ infrastructure will be repurposed for an expanded congestion zone as the revenue gathered due to high emissions will presumably dwindle to the point of making it too expensive to collect.
I looked at some prosecution stats for some local average speed cameras recently and I was surprised how many people still speed through those zones.
I could elaborate upon the PITA bureaucratic technicalities of putting up cameras, or even just passive data gathering devices that flash up a smily or a frowny face, but I’d lose your interest after a couple of lines. Believe me, we have tried. The Parish Council thought I was joking when I suggested we needed to post snipers. Yet the empirical evidence suggests that that would be the only way we’d persuade drivers to obey the law.
Well, I’m interested, Foxy. But I am very dull.
But I guess the whole thing becomes a lot easier when the driver behind wanting it to happen is the same authority that decides how and hen it’s going to happen.
Generally average speed cameras do seem to work. I travel through some long term roadworks on a dual carriageway on my way to work and for months just about everyone drove at 40 through them. Then a couple of days in a row, I started to notice more and more people going past at 50 and 60. Then someone pointed out that they had removed the average speed cameras a few days before.
I’ve followed some on the machinations behind the installation of a couple of the local average speed cameras and it’s clearly not easy, even without the little problem of who pays! Sadly in one case, one of the the addition of speed cameras has resulted in a previously calm (almost) parallel road being used as a ratrun… so the campaign for another set of cameras has started…. run that sniper idea past me again… is there any way if can be monetised?
I suspect ULEZ is broadly effective and is tackling a serious issue for many people who live in cities. There also becomes a time when old technology is no longer appropriate – lead in pair, asbestos in anything, your 10 year old laptop. A 20 year old car is probably a great recycling opportunity. And if you want one as a classic, don’t drive it into a city.
Most health and environmental issues will need a compromise. Being a pollution freedom fighter doesn’t help. Come up with a better idea.
They’re talking about introducing a ULEZ in Cambridge. There was recently a consultation and 58% city residents voted against. 70% voted in favour of better public transport. £5 per day charge.
It is nearly 15 years since I worked in town and even back then there would be a 30-minute traffic jam to get to the outskirts of the city to park my car (I did the remainder of the journey on pedal power – 25 mins by bike, another hour plus by car).
I crossed part of the inner ring road and I could smell the exhaust fumes from 200 yards away.
Better public transport is the key. Chicken and egg time, though. There’s a bus stop at the end of my road and the bus journey takes 25 mins outside of rush hour. With all those cars on the road, it takes an hour or more. And the council has just reduced its subsidy to the bus companies, so they’ve reduced the frequency of services to follow.
There’s a bus stop in my village. The bus comes twice a day. It takes over an hour and a half to reach the centre of Bristol, 15 miles away.
Twice a day? Luxury! My 86 year old father in law can no longer get a bus to do a 3 mile journey to the shops without a change half way. The direct one was cancelled in the summer.
There wouldn’t be any buses at the end of my road were it not for an Upper Sixth Former commuting to her A-level classes in Cambridge. As if she didn’t have enough to worry about, she organised a petition which made it to local news, MP & TV. The council then ‘found’ a spare Million of subsidy down the back of their sofa.
She used to feed our cat when we were on holiday and has since gone on to get a First in Medicine and is training to be a brain surgeon.
When ah were a lad, we used to dream of catchin’ bus.
We used to have buses like that in Coventry.
Happily, we sold them off to First West
Buses are rarely the answer when you need to convey large numbers of people, ,many of whom want or need to get to work at the same time. Particularly if, as in Cambridge, very large numbers of them don’t work in the centre and would have to catch 2 or three different buses
Of course, the plans have now been put to sleep, at least until the local LIb Dem and Labour councillors have been safely re-elected. The recent revisions to the proposals made it even more clear that this would be a regressive tax hitting the lowest paid the hardest.
Incidentally the bus service into Cambridge via the busway from our home is so hideous that I have got a car for the first time in 20 years. That includes ten years living without one in rural Dorset. Unless you catch the bus before 7am you can’t get on. Before that you can get on, but there is a fair chance you will have to stand up for the 8 mile ( 35/40)minute journey. Given the limitations of the city centre, it’s difficult to see how you could increase the frequency of the buses without some heroic demolition. That isn’t going to happen.
I’m out in the wild west of South Cambs, so in another 10 years the East-West train line will have a station about 20 mins walk from me. Trouble is, Cambridge train station is 20 mins walk from the rest of Cambridge.
I am so pleased I can work from home nowadays.
A few factors exacerbating the situation:
Their employment isn’t generally where working people live nowadays. It tends to be in town/city centres and business/industrial areas.
Bus services can’t be improved to any great extent in the towns/cities because of all the other traffic that’s on the roads.
A big shift to public transport would have an impact on tax revenue and the revenue of the insurance and banking industries. Revenue from motoring and motorists will decrease enormously if urban motoring is curbed.