25 thoughts on the ULEZ which will beextending on 29 August 2023 to cover (almost) the whole of London
• I don't care because I don't have a car.
• If I had a car it would probably be compliant anyway, most are.
• If I had a non-compliant vehicle I'd be absolutely pissed off by the prospect of a £12.50 daily charge or forking out for a new vehicle during a cost of living crisis.
• Most households in the current ULEZ don't have a car but most households in the extension do, so this is going to be a lot less popular.
• It's not exactly surprising that "there are more deaths attributed to toxic air in the city's outer boroughs", because 1½ million more people live there.
• The new ULEZ zone will be the existing LEZ zone... which doesn't quite cover the whole of London, so you'll still be able to belch around Chingford or sputter along Farthing Downs to your heart's content.
• The M11 and M25 aren't included but the M1 and the M4 are, plus you'll be charged if you try to drive into Heathrow.
• I wonder how many one-off visitors to London are going to find themselves stung by an unexpected £180 fine.
• Trying to gather accurate data on the existing ULEZ has been skewed by the pandemic, fuel shortages and the soaring cost of petrol, making conclusions harder to draw.
• The first ULEZ expansion was announced with over a year's notice, this one's only nine months.
• Currently only 6% of vehicles driving in the ULEZ are non-compliant, so only a small number of people are about to be shafted (but it's 17% of vans, so expect White Van Men to be angriest).
• The mayor's office estimates that an additional 135,000 vehicles a day will be affected by the extension of the ULEZ. For comparison, on an average day London residents make 6 million journeys by car.
• If you drive daily then £12.50 a day is £4500 a year. You could buy a replacement vehicle for that (which is probably the point).
• The people still driving 8 year-old diesel cars are probably the people who can least afford to replace them.
• Londoners receiving certain means-tested benefits and disability benefits can apply for grants of up to £2000 to scrap their non-compliant cars or motorcycles, so it's not the cruel draconian scheme it could be.
• It's not hard to get Londoners breathing 'cleaner air', even removing one car does that. What's hard is making a significant difference.
• If London's air is genuinely 'toxic' then I've done my lungs no good by living near the A12 for the last 20 years, but I still doubt that's what's going to kill me.
• It's ghastly that air pollution contributed to the death of that child the Mayor's always going on about, but cars hitting things kill far more people.
• If "air pollution is making us sick from cradle to the grave", then I have 57 years of breathing I ought to be able to sue someone for.
• If I genuinely wanted to reduce my exposure to toxic air the simplest solution would be to move out of London.
• The mitigation regarding "the biggest ever expansion of the bus network in outer London" is mostly spin because hardly anyone's going to live in the right place to make use of them. e.g. the first example on the list is "improved links between Harold Hill and Upminster", a journey currently made by London's least frequent bus, so nobody needs that.
• The Mayor’s new scrappage scheme will include the option to get two annual bus passes, which at £464 a year isn't exactly generous.
• Anyone who sends moaning letters to local newspapers saying "it's just another Khan tax on the motorist, we need to remove all the bus lanes instead" should be forced to pay £12.50 anyway, that's my opinion.
• If air pollution is as ghastly as the Mayor now claims, why has he taken seven years to implement this?
• Brilliant, bring it on, the fewer polluting cars the better.
