Emission zone shouldnt be the issue, it is about the amount of cars and road safety for every user.
Check e.g. the Dutch road design, where many kids ride bikes.
This is already for decades, and has nothing to do with emission zones.
But another road design can also help reducing emissions.
It is about how many people can travel safe, and with big cities, you have to reduce cars to increase the amount of people that can travel safe, like bikes, walking, and public transport.
Road and city design is very important for a livable city.
This. Though it doesn’t stop at road design. You also have to change the regulations so that car drivers are (partially) legally responsible for accidents, even when a cyclist or pedestrian made the error. Pedestrians and cyclists are orders of magnitude more vulnerable. Putting much more of the legal burden on car drivers makes them more careful.
The hard part is that you also need to build a cycling culture. Most car drivers in NL are more mindful of cyclists, because they are cyclists themselves as well.
Circling back to road design. In our mid-sized Dutch city, it’s often faster to go from A to B than by bike than by car because of the excellent biking infrastructure and car-free city center. Everything is designed around cycling, some traffic lights will even give bikes a green light more often when it’s raining.
> car drivers are (partially) legally responsible for accidents, even when a cyclist or pedestrian made the error
Here in Norway the traffic law states[1] that everyone should be considerate, heedful and careful to avoid harm, and this stands above everything else.
So you can indeed get (partial) blame even if the rest of the rules and regulations say you did nothing wrong.
For example you can't just ram a cyclist or a pedestrian if you have the right of way, but you saw them, or should have seen them, in time to take avoiding action.
Having a quick look at the NYS traffic rules[2] as a semi-random point of comparison, I'm assuming most states have something similar, it does say at the start that "no person shall operate a vehicle in a manner that will endanger any person or property".
This seems to be similar in spirit but not quite the same. I guess I could see the NY courts could find in favor of the driver where the Norwegian courts would not, depending on how they draw the line of endangering.
What the law says is one thing. What actually gets enforced is another. There is almost 0 probability of any consequences for a driver in NY who kills a cyclist, regardless of whose fault the incident was, as long as the driver doesn’t flee from the scene.
The US is not really a developed country with stable rule of law in the same way most countries in Western Europe are.
It’s similar in Germany, where truck drivers regularly kill cyclists on right turns and get away with a four figure fine and (if the judge has a bad day) a few months of license suspension.
Here in Norway, the one crossing lanes has the blame almost regardless. So with a bicycling lane on your inside, you have to be very, very careful.
However the exact limits to that are being tested. There's just been a case in front of the supreme courts here[1], where a e-cyclist in a bike lane got run over by a truck doing a right-hand turn in a busy intersection.
A similar case back in 2019 ended with 60 days of jail for the driver of the truck[2], though that one seems more cut and dry.
It's often said that if you want to get away with killing an American, first give them a bicycle. Drivers just say "they came out of nowhere" or "the sun was in my eyes" and that's that.
Yes. Due to how space is used in the US (with all but a tiny minority of people living in car-centric areas), most Americans view cars as tools and bikes as toys, think the main purpose of roads is driving, and feel that cyclists on public roads are an annoying nuisance.
This mentality is a bit less common in major city centers, but by no means nonexistent.
So a pro-car and anti-cyclist bias pervades every part of the justice system: police, prosecutors, judges, and juries, and it's extremely unlikely for a driver to be found guilty of anything in an incident involving a cyclist, unless the driver did something overtly malicious like fleeing the scene.
You can’t really do that without investing heavily in cycling infrastructure like the Dutch do. Not just designing but redesigning roads when accidents happen. A city like Seattle attempts to put the burden on drivers in theory, but crappy road designs (including lots of occluding on street parking) with little to no change when accidents occur often move incident sentiment firmly into the “not much the driver could have done” accident category.
Not building good ones. You have right aways to consider also, often your best option is to build on an existing road, but if you don’t get rid of onstreet parking on that road it’s a huge hot mess.
Which is why bad road design is a mitigating factor. You can technically get away with speeding in the Netherlands if the road design is very inadequate. This happened a a few times when most cities were simply spamming "30kph" signs everywhere and did not put road furniture in place to limit the speed. They quickly learned that was not enough as drivers fought their tickets. It's not as black and white as a mentioned but you get the jist of it. You thus always need incentive for the municipality to fix the road design.
In the Seattle area, cyclists routinely wander out of the cycling lane on the RHS into the car lane, and wander back, and some are determined to ride on the 4 inch stripe separating the two. None of them ever look over their shoulder before doing this.
A couple weeks ago one swerved out of the bike lane so he could draft behind me.
Around the same time, oncoming cyclists (a cohort) not only wandered out of the bike lane, they wandered into my lane (the oncoming traffic lane). I had to brake hard.
I do not understand what is the matter with them. Brain damage? I've ridden a bike on the roads for decades, I always rode as if the cars could not see me.
The people who lay out the paths must be high, as there are multiple places where the bike lane and the car lane swap sides in an X. Don't they remember those kid slot car toys that had an X piece of track for the purpose of crashing the slot cars?
Dutch cyclists also do all these things. As a driver in the Netherlands, you'll quickly learn that cyclists don't stick to any rules, they will cross red lights, use the wrong lane, use the sidewalk if it saves them 2 seconds, ignore yield signs etc, and in general they will come from every direction imaginable.
In a car, the onus is still on you to pay more attention. Defensive driving style is the norm - assume mistakes will be made and rules will be ignored. After all, you're driving a 1-2 ton machine whereas a cyclists will be generally be <100kg at slower speeds, bike included.
That said, road design of course matters a lot. In the Netherlands, bike lanes in 50 kph (~30 mph) zones are preferably separated by a curbstone. Meaning it is often physically impossible to cross into the car lane. Bike lanes for roads with higher speed limits are rare in urban areas, and nearly always curb-separated where they exist. Intersections will have islands for cyclists and pedestrians to pause. Most residential areas are 30 kph (~20mph) zones, where most bike lanes have dashed lines. Counterintuitively, cars are expected to drive with two wheels on the bike path in these cases. This prevents cyclists from being in the car's blind spot[0].
Is it really too much to ask cyclists to stay in the bike lane? not draft behind cars? don't wander into the oncoming traffic lane?
What good is a lawsuit going to do for a crippled cyclist?
I once took a performance driving class. One of the lessons is "be predictable". The other drivers have an excellent chance at missing your car if you're moving in a predictable fashion.
Cyclists rarely leave the bike lane for pleasure, it's usually either because a car is parked on the bike lane, pedestrians are walking on it, or because there's litter or a bad surface (bikes are much more sensitive to uneven road surface, but at the same time bike lanes, especially those that are separated from the road, are often built with lower standards than the streets).
Reading your comment one would think cyclists are just suicidal for the fun of it, but try to think of them as humans who have a goal to achieve and are trying to achieve it with the best efficiency/safety balance they can find, like other people. Cars are everywhere on the road, impeding and endangering cyclists, so it's often a matter of trying to find the "least dangerous" way to do something, and that might even involve getting on the wrong side of the road at times. But it's not for fun.
> Cyclists rarely leave the bike lane for pleasure, it's usually either because a car is parked on the bike lane, pedestrians are walking on it, or because there's litter or a bad surface
I see them doing it all the time, and I can clearly see there is no problem with the bike lane.
Also remember cyclists actually have to work to keep their momentum. Did you stop and check for crushed bottles? Glass will puncture your tires on a bike
> Cyclists rarely leave the bike lane for pleasure, it's usually either because a car is parked on the bike lane, pedestrians are walking on it, or because there's litter or a bad surface (bikes are much more sensitive to uneven road surface, but at the same time bike lanes, especially those that are separated from the road, are often built with lower standards than the streets).
Or you know, turning left (or turning right in the UK). Or entering a roundabout, where it's generally better to take your lane, if you are not leaving at the first exit.
Can you think of why it is a good idea for vehicles which weigh 2000kg and more to be used to transport 90kg loads all day long at needless risk to lesser road users?
Why can't the motor vehicle industry develop smaller powered vehicles sheltered from the elements for personal transport, something not much more than a 3 wheeled scooter with a canopy?
As a technically aware guy does that really make sense?
Motor vehicles as they are are primarily recreational vehicles and status symbols, not means of moving 100kg individuals and their handbags or briefcases if they are carrying any around town.
Do you ride as a commuter, or as a recreational cyclist or as Strava beater?
The point I'm making here is that a commuter cyclist is not supposed to be hyperaware or extra vigilant of the dangers they are surrounded by if they are not riding on a dedicated motor highway.
In fact riding on what in the UK we call the hard shoulder on the motorway (which is illegal anyway) is way way more safer than riding in the city, even though there may be cars whizzing by at 70mph.
Drivers going around town don't drive in a hyper-aware state for fear that they may be crushed by an 80 ton battle tank traveling at over 70mph for a minor lapse in judgement, or even carelessness. They even divert their attention to fiddle about on their mobile phones and their Tesla touch screens without coming to any harm.
Why should a cyclist making the 15 minute 3 mile journey in to work in an urban environment be in a hyper-vigilant mental state unlike the driver?
I'm not saying it is okay for cyclists to ride around in alackadaisical manner which too many of them do, but the consequences for such lapses should not be death or serious injury, especially if they are just riding around town.
When a cyclist says that they find their 4 mile commute to work more stressful than the weekend rides out of town where they may do a 100 miles in day, you know there is a problem, and this is an experienced cyclist.
Take a look at this clip and tell me where the young woman erred? In fact she didn't. If the driver had been ahead of her in the outer lane, checked for her presence before swinging out and waited for her to pass there would have been no danger. He just swung out from the inner lane assuming that she had noticed him, when she hadn't and had no cause to.
There is nothing to even suggest that the side of the cab had turn indicators that she would have noticed when he begin signalling only after getting alongside her - in the other lane -.
The comments should tell you the kind of dangers cyclists face, and it is usually drivers most of the time.
Please remember that not all cyclists by nature are as aware as you are, but they should still be able to ride their bikes just like drivers who may be even less than vigilant cyclists.
You say this as if cars adhere to the rules given at all times. The difference is that bikes do it at their own peril and cars do it at the peril of others. Give cyclists good infrastructure separate from cars and they'll use it.
I'm sorry but anecdotal evidence is barely any evidence at all. I could list a very large number of news reports of cars ramming in to houses an businesses, which I can promise you are not built in a lane.
Bike lanes and car lanes should be physically separated, sure for bikes to not veer out of lane, but more importantly to keep cars in theirs.
In any of these situations cars are still the ones bringing a 1.5k bundle of glass and steel to the fight.
Just take a quick look at https://x.com/WorldBollard for numerous examples of cars going all over the place and making a mess of it.
> Is it really too much to ask cyclists to stay in the bike lane?
Yes, this is like asking cars to stay in their lane. How often do you see a car outside of their lane? For me, every day.
Even if everyone had perfect intentions, mistakes would still be made. What then? Everyone has been operating on the assumption mistakes would not be made. So then, your assumption was incorrect. If you instead assume mistakes will be made, i.e. defensive driving, then you're better off.
That sounds like an odd setup. Any chance this was near the airport?
Also did you visit the Netherlands, or only Amsterdam? Because honestly, Amsterdam is in a league of its own with the hordes of tourists who have no clue what they are doing on a bike.
I cannot agree more, the cyclists and all the high speed scooters are crazy in Amsterdam. Horrible experience. Everytime trying to cross a roads it felt like I am risking my life.
Can't speak to your specific circumstances, but often bike lanes are just terrible. They allow cars to park in them, or they are too narrow, or they are blocked by construction, etc.
In general far less consideration is given to the blocking of a bicycle lane than a car lane, so cyclists are often disinclined to use them. They also often just... end, at places like intersections (so it's a good idea for the cyclist to occupy a regular lane or somesuch ahead of time).
I guess the point is that you often don't know all of the reasons someone might be riding in a specific way, and it's worth giving the benefit of the doubt.
> I guess the point is that you often don't know all of the reasons someone might be riding in a specific way, and it's worth giving the benefit of the doubt.
What would you think of a car wandering randomly into other lanes?
Here in GA it happens all the time. LoC with the driver staring at a screen or off into space deep in a conversation. It is mandatory for me to drive within the lane because if for instance there is a 2' shoulder with a rumble strip I'll get a full size semi driving 55 mph right on that right white line within an inch or two of me. Ordinarily nice people get very aggressive in their gigantic killing cages.
Living in European cities with multimodal transportations, what I fear the most are cyclists. Cars drive on very clearly delimited space, respect the driving code quite properly and are visible and audible from far away.
Bicycles on the other hands drive fast, both on road and pedestrian ways with a sense of entitlement that they somehow have priority over pedestrians. They are also harder to spot. My worst fear when walking in the city are those Uber Eats guys riding huge electrical bike and going as fast as possible. An impact with that is a sure way to hospital if not worse.
I find cyclists in London annoying too, but the vast majority of serious injuries to pedestrians are caused by cars.
As proof, I cite this amusingly stupid 2024 Daily Mail article which notes that "more than 30 pedestrians have been killed by cyclists over the past decade".
If it is a proper bike lane, ie a physically separated bike lane that shouldn't happen. If the speed at which you are allowed to drive at is high enough that colliding with a pedestrian or cyclist will cause them serious injury or death then the road design is wrong.
Simple fact is people make errors in judgement, suffer lapses in concentration, or even develop strokes when they are on the highways. A person moving around on urban roads who suffers such an event should not suffer life-changing injuries or death from it.
A safe road environment which pedestrians and cyclists are allowed to use is one in which the horizontal impact of a collision shouldn't result in serious injury or death. Death should only come from an impact which involves in serious head injury, such as the head striking the sidewalk, a heavy vehicle rolling over a person, or the case of a frail elderly person.
If you get back to UK law for instance, there are 19th century laws(they still on the books) which forbade "furious riding" on public highways which should tell you that riding at a gallop on a public road was illegal, and would be even more so in a built up area shared with pedestrians and other horse carriages. There were no cars or even bicycles them. It is one of the laws under which cyclists can be prosecuted.
Cars doing 30mph outpace galloping horses which should tell you that even at 50kph cars are driving at speeds considered dangerous for pedestrians and cyclists around them.
Yet a cyclist who has no more protection than a pedestrian is supposed to share a road with 2+tonne vehicles of reinforced steel travelling at speeds far faster than a horse rider or carriage driver riding furiously.
How does that make sense?
I see you are Walter Bright of Zortech C++ infamy and the D language ;)
> Yet a cyclist who has no more protection than a pedestrian is supposed to share a road with 2+tonne vehicles of reinforced steel travelling at speeds
By speed alone, bikes are to pedestrians what cars are to bikes. A pedestrian will walk at 3-5km/h. A bike will be 5-7 times faster than that at 15-35km/h (especially since the advent of e-bikes which ignore assist requirements). Cars will be 1.5-4 times faster at 40-50km/h. Where I live I feel less safe as a pedestrian sharing the sidewalk with a bike lane than I feel on the bike sharing the street with cars (except car doors randomly opened in my path, that's what terrifies me). Not a day passes without a cyclist almost running me over when I cross on a green light, or because they try to squeeze around on the sidewalk at unsafely high speeds.
When it comes to protection, the usual killer is a strong hit on the head. You don't need too much speed to cause a fall. But despite cyclists riding and implicitly hitting the ground at higher speeds, protecting the old melon with a helmet is still seen as optional (embarrassing, unfashionable, uncomfortable). Cyclists take fewer precautions than drivers while exposing themselves to higher risks than pedestrians.
Can't tell you how many times I was asked why am I bothering with the helmet, "I'll get suntan stripes". In my circle of friends the only other one wearing a helmet for city riding (everyone wears it on the long roadbike rides) is one who has a lot of kids as is terrified of leaving them without a father. Everyone else rides as if the epitaph of "The other guy should have paid more attention" will give anyone consolation.
If only the speed was the big issue, but mostly it is the mass. Even with all the reckless cyclists there are very little fatalities where cyclist runs over pedestrian. Ultimately separating all groups would be the best, but heavy consequences for the heaviest road users is ultimately the solution.
> Ultimately separating all groups would be the best, but heavy consequences for the heaviest road users is ultimately the solution.
I agree that physical separation would be the best, with curbs or fences not just painted lines.
As a pedestrian I would very much like to not share the sidewalk with any vehicle under any circumstances. Most people riding a vehicle on the sidewalk have no real legal constraints and the least respect I've witnessed anyone having towards the rest of the people. Pedestrians come in all shapes, sizes and ages, can't walk like robots and will easily step into the bike lane, or drop something, or a child will run around, etc. Riding at 30km/h in that environment is common and stupid.
As a cyclist I'd much rather have the cycling lane on the street. Cars are more dangerous but also generally more predictable than pedestrians on a narrow sidewalk. Driving also has more regulation and enforcement. From my experience cars are a danger to me as cyclist at intersections (the dreaded right turn) and a terrifying thought when it comes to doors opening in front of me.
As a driver I'd rather lose a driving lane to a cycling one than to have cyclists randomly bobbing in and out of my lane, crossing my path after crossing a red light, or after ignoring the right of way.
Which shows that there is something wrong with Seattle. In my city the vast majority of people cycle. In my 42 years, I can only remember one person who lost a tooth cycling. We were kids and there was no car nearby.
I cannot even think of many people with a serious injury at all. And me and my peers started cycling when we were 4 or 5 and most still do it daily (it’s the primary means of transportation within the city).
Build a bike infrastructure, make car drivers more responsible. People will be healthier because they have daily workouts.
> By speed alone, bikes are to pedestrians what cars are to bikes. A pedestrian will walk at 3-5km/h. A bike will be 5-7 times faster than that at 15-35km/h (especially since the advent of e-bikes which ignore assist requirements). Cars will be 1.5-4 times faster at 40-50km/h.
When it comes to collision you should remember the formula "half m v squared". A cyclist with his bike is usually less than 100kg which yields on impact. A collision with a pedestrian can be as bad for the cyclist as it is for pedestrian.
A car will be at least 20 times heavier and twice as fast as the cyclist and will not yield on impact. The bonnet and windscreen maybe, but not the chassis after the bumper yields.
> Where I live I feel less safe as a pedestrian sharing the sidewalk with a bike lane than I feel on the bike sharing the street with cars (except car doors randomly opened in my path, that's what terrifies me). Not a day passes without a cyclist almost running me over when I cross on a green light, or because they try to squeeze around on the sidewalk at unsafely high speeds.
Statistically you are in far more danger of getting killed by a motor vehicle on the sidewalk or an intersection than you are by a cyclist riding the sidewalk or jumping a red light. A cyclist will usually inflict a painful bruise on collision. Even needing to be hospitalized is unlikely.
Despite the blatant and often overlooked red light jumping by cyclists on busy city streets, how many fatalities occur from that behaviour, compared with those from motor vehicles?
Another thing to be said. The danger from the cyclist stems primarily from the cyclists riding manners, and has more to do with the social and cultural attitudes. The danger of the motor vehicle comes from the nature of the motor vehicle itself, its mass, steel reinforcement and speed which is compounded by the attitudes of drivers.
The average speed of a cyclist on urban streets is roughly that of a top level marathon runner if not less, and how scared are you by the danger a marathon runner with a metal bar held in front of them poses in a collision?
> Can't tell you how many times I was asked why am I bothering with the helmet,
On the matter of cyclists wearing helmets, how different is a cyclist riding on a narrow road without a sidewalk differ from pedestrian walking the same road? Does the absence of a safe sidewalk to use mean the pedestrian should wear a helmet in case they collide with a car?
Helmets worn by cyclists are no different from those worn by horse-riders or in other high impact sports. They serve to protect the helmets from impacts incurred on their own account, not from collisions with motor vehicles, although they do help in the latter.
> When it comes to collision you should remember the formula "half m v squared"
Of course a car is faster, heavier, and more dangerous but spherical cow and all that. I've never seen a "frontal" collision between a pedestrian and a cyclist. And 99% of incidents I've witnessed between cars and cyclists were side swipes (the car slides into the cyclist's path and the contact is on the side) or the car flat on cutting off the cyclist who subsequently hit the side of the car like a wall. Neither are influenced much by speed.
> how different is a cyclist riding on a narrow road without a sidewalk differ from pedestrian walking the same road?
About 25km/h of difference. Meaning anything the cyclist does happens 7 times faster than with the pedestrian. Hit a pothole? You fly over the handle bars for some meters at 25-30km/h instead of 1.5m under pure gravity.
> They serve to protect the helmets from impacts incurred on their own account
Helmets are there to protect your head from an impact. They don't bother to assess blame.
You're really taking this as "but that's worse so nothing else matters". And this makes you forget one obvious thing: everyone is a pedestrian, not everyone is a cyclist or a driver. Whether you're 8 or 80 years old you're a pedestrian so there's no excuse to endanger them because "it could be worse". And another big difference is street traffic is regulated, sidewalk traffic is not. A cyclist among pedestrians is a more immediate and unpredictable danger to pedestrians (sure, not deadly, a broken wrist is just really unpleasant).
The bottom line is that from my personal experience looking around as mainly a pedestrian and a cyclist, this conversation withstanding, cyclists are the group of people who always expect the favorable treatment even though the cyclist who respects the law is more of a mythical creature. On the street the cars are bigger and faster so should pay more attention. On the sidewalk the same logic no longer applies, the bike is "not that fast or heavy", the injuries aren't "that serious" so the pedestrians should pay attention instead.
Almost all roads are designed in the US by a professional engineer who is legally liable for the design. we need hold them responsible for not designing good infrastructure. If politicians don't allow for something safe than their job is to say it cannot be done.
If you are ignorant of things well known in the literature that is not a mistake. Even if everyone else is, that is not an excuse, their job is to design things safe.
please never change to how the dutch do it. If you do not cycle in the netherlands, it's a nightmare. The cyclists don't obey traffic laws, hell they don't even look down roads most of the times for oncoming traffic.
I wonder if the flatness of the country plays a part? I live on a hill and am surrounded by hills. A 3km ride in any direction and back is hard work. Lots of e-bikes here, and lots of mountain biking. But when I suggested getting a bike to my SO for her to get to the closest bus stop faster, the hills were the reason why she’d rather walk.
This is almost completely solved by e-bikes. You can convert practically any bike to an e-bike and while it does cost money, it is cheaper than the costs associated with driving a car or the bus by orders of magnitude over the life time of the bike.
Walking is fine as well, though. No real reason to play off walking and cycling against each other.
I rode a bike in Lausanne, which was a primarily 3D city. T was a bit of a struggle to get up the hill in the morning though, you could coast back down at night. Before that I lived in Seattle which wasn’t as extreme, but if you lived on say Queen Anne hill instead of Ballard, I could see where that wouldn’t work out. Maybe that’s why Minneapolis has better cycling infrastructure than Seattle.
Yes, super-recent developments may obviate hills, but 40 years of city design have already happened. The Netherlands case was easy mode, and they leaned into it while extending their cities. That's not useful for almost any other country.
Also e-bikes are expensive and heavy, of course, so they're a good gentrification measure, if you're into that sort of thing, but they aren't for everyone.
And cheaper and less heavy than a space shuttle. But neither will seem that relevant when it comes to parking and securing your electric bike when you live 5 floors up.
Lack of parking can be a barrier to adoption with any type of bike. Nobody wants to lug any bike up stairs.
But it's a solvable problem. Newer apartment buildings in London must provide secure cycle parking for residents and visitors.
For older buildings that lack such provisions, London councils often provide secure (covered, lockable) on-street cycle storage facilities. 1 or 2 car parking spaces can be converted into parking for many bikes! [1]
> The hard part is that you also need to build a cycling culture.
> You also have to change the regulations so that car drivers are (partially) legally responsible for accidents
This is all easy to create. It all starts with infrastructure. If you have infrastructure that is safe for bikes, you will create culture. You will also open up extra legal safeguards, but it has to start with infrastructure.
> even when a cyclist or a pedestrian made the error
Surely this depends on how bad the error is?
Suppose you have a cyclist and driver traveling opposite (180 degrees) directions on the same road toward a 4-way stop. The driver stops, looks all ways, notes the cyclist approaching the intersection soon, and enters the intersection. The cyclist then does not stop, does not signal, and turns left (from their perspective) in front of the car which was already in the intersection.
Most of the time, you'd probably need one more failure for that to result in a collision (manufacturer's defect in the accelerator, cyclist slips and falls, ...), but suppose the car did hit the cyclist and none of those other failures were the driver's fault either. In your model, how much legal blame should the driver have?
I briefly studied law in the Netherlands and it was used as an example. Our lecturer told us that if "A person on a bike would jump out of an airplane on a bike, land with a parachute on a highway and get hit by a car, just maybe would the car have a case."
The reasons for this are varied. Cars are insured, bikes are not. But most importantly, in basically all traffic situations with cars and bikes the car introduces the danger and should thus bear the responsibility of any accidents.
If I go out in public swinging a katana, and someone walks in to it. I'm still the person swinging a katana in public. Driving around in 1.5 metric tonnes of steel and glass comes with certain responsibilities.
I think the big issue here is that drivers are tested (poorly) and licensed. Cyclists aren't, which is good because it includes kids. Are we going to hold 8 year olds legally liable? They're allowed to bike on the public streets and roads, after all.
This also requires said vulnerable participants to stop having a deathwish. I'm scared to hell from cyclists in London, because they are inconsiderate and extremely unpredictable. Try rolling up to a major 4 lane intersection, and you are going to have cyclists materializing out of thin air on both sides.
Furthermore, visibility on UK roads is very poor. You often have very tall hedges lining streets, which means you can't see more than a few meters until the very last moment.
You'd need to basically rip up the entire city and rebuild it from scratch, and then replace all the inhabitants with rational actors. It's simply not going to happen otherwise.
> and you are going to have cyclists materializing out of thin air on both sides.
It is called filtering and it is totally legal in the UK. It should be no problem if you are patient and allow the cyclists to ride off first when the lights go green.
In a properly designed system the green light should come on for the cyclists first, then the larger vehicles can follow on after that.
Ah yes, thanks for mansplaining that to me. I was totally unaware that the concept of filtering exists - particularly as a motorbike rider of 20 years...
With that out of the way, like all things, filtering works when all participants are careful. Motorbikes are actually quite a bit easier to deal with (as a car driver), because a) they can be heard and b) they are quite a bit bulkier.
Even as a motorbike rider, it's not cars that I'm most afraid of, but cyclists. Again, this is not about arguing against being careful - on the contrary. I'd like the cyclists to exercise just as much care as they are asking others to exercise. It's basic self preservation. What good is it to a dead cyclist that it was the truck driver's fault?
Yes, but until the ICE is gone, emissions and car flow is linked.
An ultra-low emission-zone limits car flow by only allowing a smaller subset of cars to pass. A restriction on car flow reduces emission by allowing fewer emitters.
A low-emission zone can be a way to gradually reduce car traffic, and at the end it may be low enough that you can limit car traffic to residents only, or even no one at all.
Sorry but it's simply to put the rich in power to drive their new EV SUVs while limiting people with less money from driving their own car. People who have 4 kids: "sorry your Citroen is not enough. Buy yourself an ID Buzz we don't care."
Driving a used Renault Zoe or Nissan Leaf does not "put the rich in power". Larger cars will also become available on the used market, but that requires the market for new cars for "rich people" to be very active as that's how the used car market works.
That's not entirely true. There are places in Z1-2 where people live in flatshares etc. on ordinary salaries. I lived in an ex-council flat near the Elephant with three other people for a few years, for example.
That doesn't change the substance of your point, though. Very few people living in Z1 or Z2 run a car unless they're rich: parking is extremely difficult and public transport is so good that there are very few reasons to want one unless you're regularly leaving London.
Being from Sweden that is how I measured safety for a large part of my adult life. How safe I felt in a new area directly depended on how far I could walk with my dog without crossing car traffic.
In Malmö for example I could walk for 2 hours and only cross 2 roads. Because the bicycle network is so developed they have underpasses for bikes that us pedestrians can use.
Then I lived in the balkans and saw the stark contrast.
But there's no point in shoving this down American's throats because their whole country is far too vast for European design. They need to fill it up with people for a few hundred years like Europe before they will be forced to implement good street design.
> their whole country is far too vast for European design.
That's not really true though. There is no particular reason to think of the vast almost empty spaces when thinking about urban and suburban spaces. There are plenty of walkable towns in the US, the problem is that there are vastly more towns that are not. I spent quite a lot of time in Raleigh NC and the surroundings in the 1990s and early 2000s and walked and cycled everywhere. There were a lot more roads to cross than in Malmö of course but it was still quite reasonable.
One need not be forced to implement good urban design, one merely needs to want it.
And I would also say that most towns in Sweden are not really very typical of European towns, even Norway next (where I live) is different. Sweden has a lot more space available than most European countries and in fact has an average population density (25/km2) lower than that of the US (33/km2).
It is worth noting that London has ~80% of the population of the Netherlands but is some 5 times smaller. That's very much apples to oranges.
Stricter low-emission zones result in fewer cars in the short term (because some subset of the existing cars no longer enter). In the longer term they might result in fewer cars because the initial car reduction brings other benefits (such as safer cycling/playing/whatevering and reduced congestion which benefits public transport).
This is not false, but it isn't either completely true!
Those pesky car commuters keep driving because they have yet to be offered a solution that decreases the only metric every commuter is interested in: clock time from door to door.
Clock time is not one metric. The metric I care about more, as a users of a car, bike, rental scooter, bus, and subway, is the variance in door-to-door time.
If it takes less 80% of the time but 20% of the time I'm 20 minutes late, I won't use public transport. (I'm not talking about rare occurrences, I'm talking about once a week on a random day being late.)
I also live in a very hot city with 5 months of summer a year, so walking distances and A/C are also a critical factor.
Given the challenges of enforcing strict regulations on emissions, could a market-based approach like a carbon tax be a more effective deterrent for high-emission vehicles and corporate practices?
This comment is a great example on how to "lie" with statistics.
Saying they are in the "top 10 of highest co2 emissions in Europe" (they are 9th) is such bad faith without explaining that they are also the 9th most populated country in Europe.
off course you can. And it's been proven over and over. Are you really trying to argue that wearing a helmet is not safer than not wearing one?
Not all car and cyclist collisions are high speed, big impacts, in fact, statistically speaking, most of them in the netherlands are slow speed knocks, cyclist, get bumped, when a car tries to squeeze by, and the cyclist falls and hits their head on the concrete or whatever else is close by.
And then there are all the cyclist against cyclist collisions, someone gets knocked off, and smacks their head against the curb.
But I guess the dutch way of saying "we are dutch and are born on a bicycle and know how to cycle", (and they really actually don't), is easier to say than, looking at the actual stats, and seeing they are wrong.
What stats are you referring to? The Netherlands has one of the lowest per-km cyclist fatality rates in the world, at least with 2009 numbers[1]. Would be interested to see if that has changed.
(Some extra nuance: it is of course true that, ceteris paribus, wearing helmets is strictly safer. It's just that the Dutch stats show that proper infrastructure is even more important, and cyclists are less of a danger to other traffic participants than people in cars, which is why there's no stronger push for making people wear helmets — it might cause them to stop cycling. At an individual level, for sure, wear helmets, but as a society, there are better things to focus on when it comes to traffic safety.)
I don't actually know how strong the evidence is for that.
Your source for helmets making up lots of deaths is talking about a recent increase in deaths, even though the lack of helmets has been a thing for decades.
It's not the lack of helmets by itself that's a problem; it's the combination with high-speed electric bicycles, and their primarily being used by the elderly, that is causing deaths.
Yes, old people falling and sustaining heavy injuries that they wouldn't have had with a helmet is a problem, but not one that (I think) can be solved by street design.
If you see that in 2018, the Netherlands had 4.7 deaths per billion vehicle kms, vs. the US's 6.9, and then consider that it's a very densely populated country where lots of traffic intersects, then I would count that as a big success.
My 2c as a local: a significant issue with any discussion of this is that people don't really have a good handle on the actual statistics of who drives in London.
It cuts across every demographic. Under 25k household income - a good 40-50% of households have a car. Housing estates - tons of cars. Well off - almost everyone.
It mostly comes down to whether someone has a need (e.g. has children, fairly mobile in their job, has family outside of town, enjoys going on road trips etc) and actually wants to pay for it rather than anything else.
In addition to that, a bunch of stuff happened basically at the same time. We got ULEZ, we got a ton of low traffic neighbourhoods (e.g. streets where cars are not allowed at certain times of day regardless of emissions), we had COVID meaning that habits and demographics changed, we had Brexit which probably had some minor effect, etc. All of that happened within about 5 years and I don't think you can isolate any of them.
I don't really find most discussions about it interesting as a result of all of the above - it usually just ends up with someone trying to find evidence for their pre-existing position rather than anything that feels actually scientific, unfortunately.
My 2c as a local: I live in zone 2 and at least anecdotally I am in disagreement with your point here. So I looked it up in your link from TfL - "There are 2.56m cars licensed in London. This equates to an average of 0.3 cars per adult. In total, 46 per cent of households do not have a car, 40 per cent have one car and 12 per cent have two or more cars, with very few households owning more than two cars."
This is the same as your stated numbers, but framed in a substantially different way. In addition I suspect this is dominated by the outer boroughs; maybe one or two of my 20+ coworkers who live in zones 1-3 have a car, it's more once you get z4+.
By Zone 5 you're basically almost back to the world of infrequent bus services and out-of-town supermarkets so it's a lot more understandable why you need a car.
Anecdotal sample from my village just outside Zone 6 (but inside M25): every single one of my neighbours has 2 cars, some have 3 (or 4). Basically every adult or young-adult member of the household who has to go somewhere on their own has a car. You could argue that they don't need that many, but take it this way: the reliability of the UK train network has become absolutely disgraceful. They are either on strike, or if they are not striking, then they are doing engineering works, and if neither of those are happening, then there is a major disruption. This means that in the last 6 months, I think there have been 2-3 weeks perhaps where the connection into London was reliable.
I skipped over this issue, but it's absolutely right. Train tickets are ridiculously expensive - to the degree that it's cheaper to drive into town and then pay the parking. And for this price you get absolutely abysmal service.
I don't know where public transport has gone wrong in the UK, but it is truly catastrophic even compared to the post-soviet bloc countries in Europe. In fact, those tend to have much better public transport these days.
Exactly. Came here to say the same thing. I live in zone 2 and I'd say that majority of the households don't own a car because they don't need one. We only got a car after we had kids and used to Uber around when we needed a car, a lot cheaper than full time car ownership.
The point is to stop them using highly polluting cars OR stop driving altogether OR something in the middle. So the person you're responding to is right. The "older people" were saying in a roundabout away that they'd rather stop driving than playing along by getting less polluting car. And the correct answer to that is indeed: "you've made your choice, that was the entire point".
> The point is to stop them using highly polluting cars OR stop driving altogether OR something in the middle.
You can get a compliant car for as little as 1000 pounds. Virtually all gasoline powered cars after 2010 are compliant. It's not about stopping people driving altogether.
I'm not british either, but I understand the culture here is to disparage and discriminate against poor people in a slightly more polite and indirect way.
I don’t live in London though and generally don’t drive much either. When I visit people In London I either take the train or drive and pay the charge.
It is more expensive but for the amount I have to drive in London it’s fine for now.
All the diesel cars bought in the mid aughts when the fuel was still considered environmentally friendly thanks to its lower CO2 emissions.
Then again it's not like there are no buyers for the vehicles - my relative recently bought a 2012 diesel VW Golf from, apparently, a Londoner or someone who drives there frequently and didn't get that huge of a discount on it.
Sell the diesel, buy gasoline and enjoy not paying as much as you lost on the sale, only every year.
ULEZ and similar scheme are not about vehicle size. They are about Euro-spec of the engine.
There is a very vocal opposition against those: big recent SUVs are compliant, but small old cars are not, which goes against how people perceive their respective emissions.
In general:
- any EV or hybrid is OK
- petrol cars are OK if they're not too old (depending on Euro rating of the engine, I also have a 22 yo compliant petrol car, though a car from the same year could be non-compliant if the engine has a lower Euro rating)
- diesel cars need to be recent (in general equipped with DPF and other emission-control equipment that's become mandatory to pass more recent Euro-specs)
Sure. Wouldn’t drive an enormous car. I live in the county, would struggle on the narrow lanes with one of those Chelsea tractors. Big cars are only needed in the city.
Yeah, the whole "I can't afford to drive due to the ULEZ" argument really used to annoy me ... I have a 2005 Toyota (my first car, which I can't emotionally get rid of it), and it's ULEZ compliant, and it's value is probably £500 ... no excuses in my books, especially as second hand car prices are plumetting (where I am anyway).
If you can't afford a £500 car, you probably shouldn't be driving anyway.
"If you're not driving by the age of thirty, you've failed in life" was a quote I believe was attributed to Thatcher. She did some great stuff, but I'm not sure I agree with that one.
You might want to re-read what I've wrote. You've entirely misconstrued it ... (and I'm in the 'pull down the Thatcher statues and dump them in the ocean' brigade).
What annoys me about this is the assumption that ULEZ means people can't drive any more.
Every single person with a car today can continue to drive under ULEZ without paying the ULEZ fee.
They just need to have a car that isn't high emissions. They can pay to drive a non-compliant car, or they can change car to something that is compliant, and don't pay the charge. That's it.
To facilitate that, the taxpayer through the ULEZ scrappage scheme offered £2,000 even if the car was not worth anything close to that value. I've seen people get £2k for vehicles that frankly weren't worth half that.
There are plenty of vehicles available for not much more money that are ULEZ-compliant.
I think the fact this happened at a similar time when we were exposed to chatter of "government interference" from Europe (Brexit), or Whitehall (Covid lockdowns), didn't help, but the language I hear some people using is insane - we're paying for the same level of personal protection for the Mayor as for the PM because of the number of death threats he gets.
I definite;y agree very little of the debate feels scientific.
I wish the article stated if the amount of cars traveling in the zone remained the same.
I would think it probably greatly reduced the amount of traffic in that area, which all around just makes for a more pleasant experience being a pedestrian, biker, or scooterer.
Regardless, I think this is awesome and wish it could be tried in the United States. Kids being able to be independent and active is essential to their happiness and development.
I haven't really noticed any difference in traffic levels. It dipped a bit during COVID for obvious reasons and now it's back to how it was for the most part.
https://roadtraffic.dft.gov.uk/regions/6 has a good chart - 20 billion vehicle miles to 19 billion. Interestingly from the chart, local traffic stayed about the same whilst main roads seem to have lost a little.
The ULEZ zone is now basically all of the city, it doesn't quite go to the M25 (motorway ring road) but anywhere that a tourist would even remotely think of as being London is well inside it.
> Kids being able to be independent and active is essential to their happiness and development
Add to that growing up with a dog or cat (implies parents are well off enough to take care of said animal when the kid is a kid and spaces being responsible) and living when they can play in wild spaces (not manicured lawns), plant flowers, veg, etc. learn getting stung suks but usually not fatal. A big plus is being around livestock and as the kids mature, having an opportunity to take care of said livestock (4H program)
Seattle as a city is designed with all of those in mind except the livestock part.
Plenty of wild nature preserves, coyotes running around, rabbits playing along the side walks, and parks all over the place.
It is possible for cities to be built around the concept of being integrated with nature, though in the specific case of London, it is too late to tear down a bunch of houses just to increase the density of parks.
> I wish the article stated if the amount of cars traveling in the zone remained the same.
Anecdotally, traffic is worse than ever, school drop off and pickup times are particularly bad. I have on occasion been stuck in school run traffic for literally hours going <5km around Putney / Clapham.
The little darlings just are not safe in anything less than a tank. Walking the 500m to school with all those massive 4WDs that congregate around schools is tantamount to child abuse.
That is why everyone I know buys a 4WD and spends an hour driving their children 500m to and from school every day.
Definitely better than it was 10 years ago. I've visited London once every 1-6 months for the past 10-15 years, and have noted a change. It's still not amazing, though - honestly, if they were to aggressively disincentivize diesel in small cars, I feel like everything would be fine. Subjectively, a day in London seems akin to spending a few hours with a 50cm3 2-stroke chainsaw, or an hour on an old diesel excavator. I do not feel the same way about most US cities, nor even most cities in mainland Europe.
You know, I think that has. I remember this happening, but the recent years I’ve been into London on occasion, this doesn’t seem to be a problem anymore.
Some argue that these coarse particles are less damaging for your health than the finer particles we are exposed to today, even if you cannot see them settling as dirt.
Although on that part tire abrasion is probably even a larger factor than exhaust particles, even if it doesn't smell as badly. Some say the factor is beyond 1000x for tire abrasions. Info is hard here, because many sources have their own ball in the game.
But cars today are significantly more heavy, which increases these abrasions nonlinearly.
Yes as long as you stay off the deeper parts of tube, e.g the Northern Line. One of London’s biggest sources of particulate pollution is now tube train brake pads
Note that this shows Chinese Air Quality Index, which is different than EU AQI, which is different than US AQI, which is different than... you get the point. But at the end of the day they all use the same data.
I visit Londen about once a year and during my last visit I noticed the air quality was better than the year before. Pure anecdotal. But I notice these things because of my bad longs.
You want more active kids in the US? This is easy. Every neighborhood needs to have multiple adjacent lots with no construction on it. Aka, a park of sorts. It doesn't need to have slides, or games, or any of that other stuff. It just needs to be an open space with enough room that groups of kids can go and engage in outdoor activities without the need to be constantly monitored by adults. That's it.
They can play football or baseball or soccer or frisbee or tag. Doesn't matter. What matters is that you give them the room and let them do their own thing. Not only would this help them be more active, but it'd help them socialize a great deal more than they normally do.
Easiest would be to forbid cars access to the school. All over the world kids are walking to school and when I talk to US people I hear some of them are even prevented from letting their kids walking to school. Apparently some of them introduced rules out of the jealousy of the fat parents that don't want to see healthy kids walking past their diabetic ones and enter the school while they are still waiting in line in their cars.
My neighborhood has a big city park just across the street from our house, with a lot of free / empty space. One observation: The kids are too busy to go there, as they're kept occupied by homework and organized extracurriculars.
We're seeing (and contributing to, if I'm honest) this parenting mindset that you have to keep kids busy to "keep them out of trouble", thus the schedules get loaded up with organized activities. At least one outcome is that we reached a point where basically none of my kids friends were ever around for just... play. Then our kids are bored, and we'd like them to be doing something with others too, and soon we're signing up them up for activities and the cycle perpetuates.
I had a culture shock regarding this around a decade ago when my coworker declared (with pride) that his teenage son has his schedule filled up to the brim.
I recall thinking how to respond. Was that a good thing? What was he so proud of? Two extracurriculars were already a lot back in my school days.
To add to the confusion the kids in my neighbourhood don't seem to attend many classes as I see them on the playground. Is this an upper-middle class thing that I'm supposed to participate in now?
Sounds great, but is really about the minimum that needs to be done. Active kids is much more than allowing them access to an "activity zone"; it's about allowing kids and families to build activity into their normal life, which in practice means active transport and walkable/cyclable cities.
The biggest challenge for this is the risk of cars. Many suburbs don’t have sidewalks, and the sprawl often means a substantial walk. That leads to an arms race of sorts: people who think it’s too dangerous drive, making it more dangerous for everyone else and conditioning everyone to think a distance greater than the walk from the parking lot is an unreasonable level of physical exertion.
Given that cars are a leading cause of death for children past age 5, I can’t completely blame the parents for this, either – poor design is a societal failure and they’re mostly responding to the incentives set up half a century ago.
I’m not sure what you mean by “without the need to be monitored by adults.” A friend of mine from college was prosecuted for letting her kids play alone in the park across the street. Leaving kids alone outside in a US city park is child endangerment, literally.
That’s pretty startling to hear. As a child growing up in a london suburb we would disappear for hours to the local park and environs. Playing cricket, other games, or just roaming around. About the only supervision was if the dog came too.
What really endangers the development of children is the lack of adult-free outdoor play. They need to learn by themselves to assess risks and solve conflicts without any adult supervision.
Wow, sounds like a great idea but how is there a way for me to take financial gain from it? And can we protect them from active shooters in the area? Sounds like it should be under constant monitoring from the police.
This is good, but I wouldn't classify it as surprising - urbanist advocates have been going on about this for years and years. Remove the dangerous and unpleasant elements from the streetscape (cars) and active transportation flourishes (walking, biking, transit).
Brussels is planning to go EV only by 2035. At this point, there is alost no significant investments in charging capacity. Even worse, landlords are refusing to install charge points in basement garages, presumably because of insurance costs.
I'm not against EV at all, even though it is overhyped on the one side and demonized on the other. What bothers me is the hypocrisy in messaging. You can not pretend going full EV in 10 years and not be on a never befote seen giant grid replacement right now.
So what is it? Are you going to make car ownership in the city a 1% privilege? Will not much change but will everybody have to pay the exemption fee (oh yes, that exists)?
Both can be an acceptable position, just don't pretend.
It is true that politicians are not pushing charging infrastructure sufficiently - which they absolutely could, seeing they push other ridiculous and costly requirements like absurd parking space allocations - and that this needs to change. This is unfortunately common in politics. It is far, far cheaper to say things than to do things, and if they can both look good for the people that care about this, and avoid risking annoying anyone that don't care by making proposals they could protest over, then it that ends up being a win-win for them. Politics is unfortunately mainly PR these days.
But the reason EVs need to be "overhyped" is because ICE's are not sufficiently demonized to show their true gap. We keep turning our blind eye to ICE's because it is more convenient, and if we keep pretending ICE's are "maybe not great but okay", then EVs have to look ridiculously amazing to show their gap and be worth the infrastructure investment.
In reality, EVs are the "okay-ish" baseline, and ICE's should be banished all the way back to the 17th century for anything but very specific commercial applications that currently have no suitable replacement.
Yeah I'm fairly sure both politicians and car manufacturers are dialing back on their EV push; governments' subsidy pots are emptied out, there's no healthy secondhand market yet, and there's heavy competition and/or market dominance (including raw materials and batteries, but also government-assisted low prices) from China. I think that's got politicians nervous.
When I stayed in London half a year ago, we overnighted in the Limehouse area, at the edge / outside of the ULEZ.
I can tell from experience there is a big difference in the air. In that area it smelled like exhaust and smog, while the center had no such thing.
When I reflect on it, I feel that the less affluent areas have been left out to dry / rot in the exhaust. While the upper class city center is now pristine.
The ULEZ has covered the entirety of London, including Limehouse, for more than a year.
The outer zones of the city are definitely dirtier, but it has less to do with ULEZ and more to do with practical travel times. Despite great public transport, getting between the spokes of the wheel is still a challenge, so people who don’t work in the city centre often drive. The further out you go, the more people like that there are.
Limehouse is now far inside the current ULEZ boundary.
While there are small upper-class enclaves in the city center, the most affluent areas of London are the outer boroughs. You can this reflected in electoral maps as well, where the center is mostly Labour, while the outer boroughs have typically voted more rightwing.
ULEZ has expanded outward step by step, but the strongest resistance to further expansion has come from the more affluent areas further out.
This only applies if you count pensioners as “low income”. Many are indeed poor, many are wealthy while still not having a high income, but the age gap is what is driving those figures, not wealth.
Most housing is more expensive per square meter in Central London, but the housing in Central London tends to be significantly smaller on average except for the wealthiest enclaves pulling the averages drastically up, and this is then further obscured by council housing.
Put another way: Where I live in Outer London, most housing apart from a handful of conversions and some council blocks until recently started at 3-bedroom houses with gardens. There are now a few large blocks targeting renters that include smaller flats by the station, but they're all marketed as luxury flats.
A walk further out and the 5+ bedroom houses and mansions lining private sports grounds and expensive private schools start. A little bit further you get the private roads leading to private mansions alongside private primary schools.
Left/right politics, high/low income and high/low status don't map neatly onto London's demography, and haven't since Tony Blair, New Labour and "champagne socialism".
Outer and anti-ULEZ right-wing areas - Bexley, Romford, Welling, Uxbridge - might be more affluent than deprived inner-city parts, but they're a lot less affluent (as well as far less educated) than the professional-class areas of the inner city, which these days seems to span all the way from Muswell Hill down to Tooting.
Tory/rightwing votes used to be a thing for rich people who wanted to keep their winnings for themselves, pay less tax and/or encourage the less successful to work harder and pull themselves up by their bootstraps. The modern tory party seems to be mostly for losers, racists and grumpy pensioners who want to blame all their problems on immigrants, LGBTQ+ and "the woke".
I agree to an extent, but the affluent pockets of inner London have relatively few people, and often are immediately adjacent to areas that are still comparatively poor. Even e.g Kensington has seriously deprived areas. You're right it's not a straight match, but overall the narrative of the comment above about ULEZ benefiting the wealthy first and foremost didn't fit even before the expansion.
It most benefits poor (and likely minority ethnic) people living in inner London, and the built-up bits of outer London that look like inner - Hounslow, Croydon, Enfield etc.
And the biggest disbenefit is to people who identify as poor or hard-up but are in reality somewhere near or a bit above average (mostly down to whether or not they own their home outright) - and are much more likely to be white.
So it's pretty obvious how this lines up with UKIP/Reform, the whole "deserving vs undeserving" poor narrative, and why the people smashing up the cameras look a lot like football hooligans.
(for @jstanley - I'm stating why opposition to ULEZ mostly lines up with conservative and right-wing political positions - from their point of view, the "wrong people" benefit. I don't agree with them but that's how they see it.)
Side-note: in the EU, it is currently surprisingly hard to comply with LEZ. Every state has their own scheme, with information only on third-party websites. Just some examples:
* France requires postal pre-registration (they send you a sticker)
* in Italy you have to check with each municipality, who at best show you a low-res drawing of the LEZ
* (Italy:) Google Maps doesn't know about Low Emission Zones, so it happily sends you through
* (Italy, too:) There seem to be very little pedestrian zones. You can drive everywhere, through the Low Traffic Zone might not permit you through. For Google Maps, you can drive everywhere… but you'll end up getting a fine.
I'd like to see way more LEZ, but in practice, it is such a mess unfortunately…
As a Londoner in the ULEZ with a car and a bicycle, there were a lot of other changes in that general period to push people away from driving and towards cycling and the like. Blocking streets to cars, removing parking places and the like. I now find with an ebike getting from a to b in the center takes like 1/2 to 1/3 the time as driving - the cars are all stuck in non moving queues at traffic lights.
The ebikes get vandalized like crazy. There's more restrictions on where to park them every day and the cost is prohibitive for lower income users.
The green pushes govs perform tend to be a lie that benefit the wealthy and little more. Trains are much more expensive than planes. Tax incentives for expensive electric cars.
Well, nothing's perfect. I guess they try to do what they can. I boght my ebike used for £200 which is quite a lot less than a one year bus/tube pass (£1700 zone 1-2) or just the road tax on the car (£360). I'll give you the app based ebikes cost a bit although you can gat monthly passes that are not too bad.
In Germany there are a few key milestone years that are heavily documented (forget which years) and every kid has to do that with their pediatrician. In the US it's typical to have an annual exam with their pediatrician - this is free and standard for everybody with health insurance (which includes medicaid and state programs). Unlike Germany though I think a parent could be disengaged and that would mean multiple years without a checkup. In Germany I think they'd know and check in on the family if those milestone checkups weren't done.
In Germany children are required to go to school(although not necessarily a state-run school) so I guess it would be harder for a family to be "off grid".
Never have a problem getting a GP appointment, for me, or the kids, either where I live now or where I lived 5 years ago.
I assume it depends where you live if there really are shortages rather than just complaints. Or you can do like America does and pay £80 (or a £15/month subscription) for a private one through BUPA
And yet having lived in the London area for almost 7 years now (previously born in NZ):
In New Zealand I saw large vehicles like utes and defenders doing actual jobs on the terrain that they were built for. The only SUVs that I really saw were out in the wops where they wanted a dual purpose vehicle or the time I saw Saudis laughably trying to drive a 1.5 lane width full-size hummer in central Auckland.
Whereas in London, YoY since I moved here I only see more SUVs clogging the narrow roads. No pop-up headlights on a sports car for me, because they'd endanger pedestrians! But a 2 tonne defender with a brick wall of a front is perfectly fine! Not only that but it seems like >20-30% of the vehicles on the road are SUVs and are usually driven by a single occupant!
It's honestly think it's a sign of the times and of the direction our futures are going. The dystopian novels were real.
The daily charge is only for vehicles not meeting the ULEZ standards. For petrol vehicles this means meeting the Euro 4 criteria from 2005, for diesel it means meeting the Euro 6 criteria from 2014. It's hardly a surprise approximately 96% of vehicles are estimated to be ULEZ compliant in Greater London.
I think this article is mixing up correlation vs. causation.
Funny sidenote: since the ULEZ now covers Heathrow, what's the charge for an Airbus A380?
This is a terrible article, written by someone who is either dishonest or doesn't know what they're talking about and has never been to London, covering a paper that appears to be reasonably well done but has some serious limitations.
The data was collected during the 2018/2019 academic year and then during the 2019/2020 academic year (but before the Covid school closures).
First, some context:
-The original ULEZ, which the referenced study looked at covers central London and should not be confused with the much larger recently expanded ULEZ which covers the whole city. Nor should it be confused with the much smaller congestion charging zone or the larger and older Low Emission Zone which covers freight vehicles.
-The ULEZ rules are designed around penalising the driving of the oldest and most polluting vehicles only. In 2019 this was 80% of cars, the expanded ULEZ has overall vehicle compliance of 95%+.
As as result of the second point, it would not be expected that it would have a substantial effect on the number of vehicle journeys since 80% of passenger cars in the zone were already compliant anyway, therefore any effect at all is actually surprising. The paper notes a drop of 9% in total vehicle counts.
"Four in 10 London children stopped driving and started walking to school a year after the city's clean air zone went into effect."
This little quote heads the article. It seems like quite a result, right?
It isn't.
Let's look at the baselines here, something which immediately anyone who lives in London would be suspicious about because like me their first question would be: "who was driving their kids to school in central London in 2019? Are there enough for there to be four in ten at baseline to switch?". It turns out not many people do, and no.
Let's look at table 2 from the paper: (there were about 1000 kids in both the Luton and London samples)
At baseline, 856 kids in London travelled using active modes and 105 using inactive modes
In Luton that was 599 and 364 respectively
So first, we can say that "four in ten children" has to be interpreted pretty carefully here since 85% of kids were already walking to school (note that if they just took the bus the whole way this also counted as walking).
At most, we must be talking about changes to the minority of kids who weren't using active travel before, in other words maybe it's that "Four in 10 London children (of the minority who were being driven) started walking to school.
But, if we look at the changes, that doesn't quite stack up either.
In London:
47 kids switched from active to inactive (all measured based on travel "today" and in many cases there will be variation in modes across days)
44 switched from inactive to active
61 inactive/inactive
809 active/active
It doesn't look like, ignoring the Luton control for the moment, there was any modal shift at all for London!
Luton has proportionally shifted away from active transport and only in relative terms to the control has there been a modal shift.
This is already a much less positive message. "Kids in general less likely to walk to school, except in London where (potentially due to a low emissions zone) their behaviour didn't change." Where's my four in 10 gone?
The "four in 10" comes from the 44 kids who were inactive in the first sample but active in the second (out of 105 total inactive in first sample). Of course that is a much larger % of children from that group who switched in that direction than the 47 who switched the other way from much larger number of first sample actives. If your transition probabilities from A to B are much higher than B to A, but B is much larger group, you can end up in this situation here where you have impressive sounding % changes which nonetheless mean nothing and don't change the population behaviour at all.
It's a very fine thing, no doubt, to run multilevel binomial logistic regression models on data and come up with statistically significant odds ratios but I don't think these results remotely justify the news article headline and subhead.
The kids of the well-off getting to play a little bit more because the poors’ cars have been moved out of the city, and this is somehow celebrated. The upper-middle-classes are so out of touch with things that it’s scary.
My 20 year old banger worth half what the scrappage amount is is ulez compliant
Of course I good never hope to afford to live in London so I suspect “poor people in London is a myth, or of course those with massively subsidised lives already.
As many are pointing out that there is no reduction of actual daily traffic in London I recon that if ULEZ has an effect at all, it is soley caused by the gentrification London's government effectivly creates by increasing the cost of living.
Really? Have you got data on that? Everything I can find does show a drop, though difficult to disentangle from COVID. And certainly the original congestion charge produced a dramatic drop.
Vehicle ownership in London has always been expensive. Poor people have never driven in London, poor people use public transport. For all London's faults (of which there are many) the high population density makes public transport useful. Please share evidence for your assertion that the "ULEZ is a tax on being poor". Only half of households in London have a vehicle.
They're probably referring to poor (working class really) people living in outer London who have cars and are now basically frozen out of central London unless they use mass transit or pay for entry. There are also legacy car owners who are poor (rent stabilized, etc...). Anyway, the car has a major negative externality on the city's residents and usage should be taxed to reduce the over-usage of the roads regardless of whether the owner is poor or rich.
Congestion charge and parking availability would have already frozen out most lower owners driving into Central London (zone 1 and 2). What does rent stabilised mean here? Not a phrase I've ever heard regarding council housing in the UK.
Probably council housing or housing association tenants. My guess is that the person who said "rent stabilised" is American, as it is an American term - I know new yorkers in rent stabilised housing.
One of the many problems with the internet is the export of American culture.
Given the time of day it’s likely OP was just repeating YouTube talking points from outrage bait videos, rather than being an actual American, but the infection remains regardless, the whole “hands up don’t shoot” nonsense where people in the U.K. acted like the police were armed for example
The following is not a class bound remark: some people don't have culture, so they absorb americanisms more easily. Hands down, worst bit of the Internet is that it provides those americanisms.
Hold on, where were these working class Londoners parking when they drove into central London? As far as I know, _that’s_ normally extremely expensive. Like, I’m not convinced commuting by _car_ from outer London to inner London has been a particularly common mode of transport for a long time.
> usage should be taxed to reduce the over-usage of the roads regardless of whether the owner is poor or rich.
For the tax to be equally effective on rich as poor, the tax might need to be means tested. A £100 tax disproportionately affects poor people over rich people.
> Four in 10 London children stopped driving and started walking to school a year after the city's clean air zone went into effect.
I had the same interpretation of the headline as you. But, based on the quote, I think the change is that their parents stopped driving them to school.
Like, at all? pictures of LA smog in the 80's, or Beijing air pollution now should be enough to convince you that the problem is real, even if you don't believe in the latest round of it.
Why do you think emissions levels are what the kids detected that changed their behavior? I would posit reducing emissions levels had a knock-on effect that had some other effect, etc. until the last effect in the chain was what made the kids change their behavior.
Despite "emission" being in the name of the ULEZ, I don't think the article is necessarily implying that the mechanism is specifically that kids were more willing to go outside because there was less pollution.
There are various other possible mechanisms: parents decided not to drive their kids based on the fees, there were fewer cars on the road which made it more pleasant for kids to walk to school, etc.
I don’t know if kids notice, but I can smell the air pollution every time I drive into outer London from outside London. It’s how I know I’m entering London.
London is exceptionally economically polarised because of our housing policy. About 40% of people in inner London live in some form of subsidised social housing. This creates a "hollow middle" in the income distribution - people who are priced out of London because they can't afford market rents, but earn too much to qualify for social housing. You can't really be too poor to live in London, but you can be too average.
London, like most major cities, has significant wealth disparity: central London is filled with high-earning transplants living side by side with impoverished locals. Southwark is the London borough containing The Shard, Tate Modern, Borough Market, Tower Bridge yet almost 30% of children in Southwark live in poverty. Poverty touches every part of London. Even the City of London has housing estates.
Its common in British cities for most owners/renters to have terraced or detached housing while council houses (public housing) are in tower blocks or smaller apartment buildings.
I'm pretty sure anyone around there who owns his apartment does not fit the definition of poor - in fact most of the so-called rich would take more than a decade of saving up just so that they could own the same property.
The great tragedy of Europe is that asset wealth has far outpaced the earnings potential of the population.
Thanks to right to buy starting in the 80s plenty of economically inefficient people with shit jobs bought their houses in London for a tiny amount. Those are now worth a fortune.
They then rented them out and made even more money p
Strivers who actually pay market rates for rent see all their money drain away, often to “poor working class” people who now complain they can’t heat their £1m houses because we aren’t given them even more free money. Meanwhile those strivers who have a pension are about to have that ransacked to give a triple locked pay rise to those poor millionaires.
A lot of older council apartments in the UK seem to be a bit grim. There's some skepticism against apartment blocks and a lot of newer ones seem to have odd pricing.
I live in a nice apartment in Austria but I'd be a lot more critical looking for one to live in the UK.
Yeah, that and a lot seem kinda small while being a bit lower than the prices of some houses(but still too much imo). Been a long time since I dreamed of home ownership admittedly.
I thought grenfell pushed the leaseholder vs freehold pricing out in the open. I've seen stuff about leaseholders effectively in negative equity because of the cost of cladding and a previous government dropped a bill or amendment changing who had to pay for such things or the existence of leasehold.
> high-earning transplants living side by side with impoverished locals.
Hilarious take, honestly. Can you point me to some evidence, maps, tables, or discussions about the impoverished London-born living cheek-by-jowl with fancy Nigerians? This is the first I am hearing about the disadvantaged natives of London.
Now why not try and learn something about somewhere and figure out _why_ there are so many housing estates scattered throughout London. It's actually quite interesting.
It's atypical, yet it is abundantly clear that "poor" is closely mixed in with "rich".
Are you suggesting that the majority of other affluent boroughs in London and Greater London are exempt from containing Council Estates? Islington, Putney, Wimbledon, Chelsea...
I think you're thinking of immigrants as the people coming to the UK from poor countries. Most of those people don't go to London, they move to regional towns and cities.
The people who move into central London from overseas are rich emigrants (Russian oligarchs, Saudi princes, etc).
There is significant social housing in London, where the local council provides housing for people of limited means. This is a historical leftover from more enlightened times (and one that Thatcher tried to eliminate). But the amount of churn in this housing, as you can imagine, is very low - once you have a council house, you never leave it because all the other options are waaaay out of your price range. So there are whole families who have been living in poverty for generations in the centre of London.
The physical presence of Social Housing Estates is the evidence - the occupants are those that aren't otherwise able to afford housing or pay rent. As the commentator says, even the City has Housing Estates.
Majority of people who can’t afford rent in London don’t live in London. The massive subsidies that certain people get, which leads to massive opportunities for their kids and their future career, are all because of where they were born
The first time I read the comment I thought it was making an aggregate claim about newcomers being richer than natives, which struck me as obviously, spectacularly incorrect. Why else would a speaker say "high-earning transplants" specifically? If I had to point out an example of unequal wealth in London I am sure my example would be their monarch, not a vague implication of Johnny-come-lately bankers or lawyers.
I am certain that in the aggregate the relationship between wealth or income and length of tenure in London is positive.
I read it as "native Londoners" vs "everybody else". Eg "born within the sound of Bow Bells" vs. "graduated from UEA with a 2:1 in Accounting and Finance and moved into a flatshare just behind Upper St".
> I am certain that in the aggregate the relationship between wealth or income and length of tenure in London is positive.
I reckon people who were born there and didn't get a London-appropriate degree are unlikely to have amassed wealth. (Excepting Right To Buy, I suppose, but that's more Right Time than Right Place).
OP's point (which I parapharase as "there are two Londons") strikes me as blatantly true, and I've got the impression from art that 'twas ever thus.
> their monarch
You're not British, maybe? Have you spent much time in London? (I was in the "graduated from UEA" bucket above - I've left now, as people like me tend to do as they get older).
The King isn't anywhere near being the richest person living in London. It's also a strange example to choose. I mean Joe Biden is richer than the average DC native, but what does that tell you exactly?
London is a very international city, and the wealthy people who own property in the central areas come from all over the place.
> The King isn't anywhere near being the richest person living in London.
I think he's arguing that Charlie counts in the "native Londoner" bucket.
BTW, don't trust the Sunday Times Rich List estimates of the Monarch's wealth. They changed their methodology after the first list when the palace complained that the Queen came out on top.
A lot depends on how much you value some very illiquid assets. But there's no doubt that London is full of people (both British and not) who have more money to throw around than the King. He is not 'even' a billionaire in terms of his personal wealth.
And is car dependency not a tax on the poor as well? If the government only builds car-based infrastructure that requires a car then that is a tax on everyone is it not?
Perhaps they should make buses prohibitively expensive too, then everyone would be forced to either walk or bike to work/school.
Am I missing something here? Obviously if you apply sin taxes to driving then people who can't afford to pay them are going to be forced to drive less. I bet there would be plenty of "surprising benefits" if we banned all road vehicles and forced people to get around on foot and push bike too...
This article seems to be both making an extremely obvious observation (that the introduction of ULEZ is forcing poor families to get around the city in alternative ways) and missing the fact that such decisions come with both positives and negatives which need to be weighed up.
If we simply want to implement policies to benefit children's health then we'd probably be better off banning junk food. But we don't do that because we understand that there are trade-offs.
ULEZ has been a disaster for many working families and it's highly unpopular for a reason. If you're poor and don't live in the inner city, or if you don't have a nice middle-class office job and need your car/van for work then ULEZ makes you poorer and your life more difficult.
The ULEZ charge only applies to diesel cars built before 2016 or petrol cars built before 2006. ULEZ only applies in London, so all of those non-compliant cars have a ready market outside of London. If you happen to own a car that isn't ULEZ-compliant, then a second-hand car dealer will happily offer you a straight swap for one that is.
You can buy a ULEZ-compliant car for under £1000 - less than the cost of a year's insurance in most London boroughs. If you can't afford to buy a car that is only 18 years old, then I might suggest that you can't afford to own a car at all.
ULEZ charge is cheaper than a train ticket into London. GPs complaint is massively overblown. People want to keep doing what is most convenient for them and everyone elses air quality be damned.
I agree with you. The idea that ULEZ means people must give up driving is ridiculous and overblown. It does not affect the vast majority of people at all.
This. I blame the poorly chosen name. The phrase 'ultra-low emissions' suggests that only fancy-schmancy hybrids and EVs get to apply, when the truth is pretty much every street legal gasoline economy car made in the past 2 decades is compliant (it's Euro 4 and up, I believe).
The narrative that this ruling has been created by the rich elites to keep the poors out of London has been heavily pushed by some parts of the media, looking to curry favor.
I don't live in London, but my city has a similar low emission zone.
My dad is poor and must drive an hour to work because he can't afford to live in the city. When he last brought a car he stupidly listened to the government recommendation at the time and brought an extremely economical diesel car because he understood this was good for the environment, and my dad was a long-time green voter.
For the last couple of years since the low emission zone was implemented he's had to take a 30 min detour to get to work meaning it's taking him 1.30 hours to get to work adding an hour to his total daily commute and 50% to his weekly fuel bill and increasing his emissions by 50%. While he could just about afford getting a petrol car, this isn't exactly a cheap purchase for someone who only makes £25,000...
This isn't some media conspiracy. It's been making my dad's life hell for the last two years now. My understanding is that working class people who use vans for work are also getting screwed by this.
If you want to reduce the number of polluting vehicles in the city then ban non-essential cars, buses, vans and lorries. Creating a charge just means that if you're rich enough to not care you'll continue as is and if you're poor you'll get screwed and be forced to change habits.
I'm not suggesting we shouldn't prioritise clean air, I'm suggesting that we should do so in a fair way. I don't understand why anything I'm saying is controversial or why I'm being gas lit about this being a media conspiracy. Perhaps it's you who is out of touch?
Would love to know more about this low emission zone that your dad is suffering with. What’s the new route he has to take?
Though there is only one low emission zone that’s been in place “for two years” — London’s. Maybe you mean a clean air zone? Or Glasgow’s that was implemented last year?
Honestly you raise a good point about diesel, and I think the government should increase the scrappage value for people who have these middle-aged diesels. In the long run, that would probably the cheapest and wisest way to solve the issue permanently.
So if it has nothing to do with cost, why are people no longer driving? Why don't they just get compliant cars and continue taking their kids to school as normal?
Either the ULEZ charge is changing behaviour or it isn't – which is it?
It's not highly unpopular. The mayor who instigated it won the election by a clear and increased margin.
What it is , is very unpopular with a smallish minority of people, many of whom live outside London, and most of whom were contributing to pollution which should never have been free to create in the first place.
I'm curious as to what definitions of "poor" (in the most expensive housing area in the country) and "London" (where zones 1-2 have the best public transport in the country) people are using here.
It really isn't. I've got a 13 year old Toyota which is ULEZ compliant. I bought it for £4k in 2020. My previous car - a now scrapped Fiat Panda from 2007, was also ULEZ compliant. I bought that for £900 back in 2015. Obviously car prices have been changed by covid - but there are loads of compliant cheap cars available.
It's also only limiting driving within the city limits. You're free to drive anywhere else. Hardly totalitarian.
