London bans cars for a day in the fight against air pollution

The monthly ticket that is very common in Germany either doesn't exist here or is ridiculously expensive. Even if you go by tube on a daily basis you are better off paying for each trip.

I think for most people commuting into London daily the saving of an annual ticket would be the equivalent of one month, so 8% off. And that of course requires paying upfront... Which means several thousands of Pounds for many people. ~£500 a month for train commute into London + tube is not uncommon.

A standard peak time return for my train into London is about 22£, according to the National Rail season ticket calculator the average journey price on the annual ticket is only 9£, so a pretty reasonable saving if you're going every day.

This is without the tube ticket (which is an add-on option on regional trains going into London), so I spend about 75-100£pcm on that as well, with contactless payments.

I wouldn't own a car if I only used it for commuting; that's the easy case because generally most people have the same job for months at a time.

By contrast I can't simply move back to my home town without giving up work; I can't live near all of my friends that moved around the country; I can't simultaneously live everywhere I visit.

So the fact that a single or return train ticket costs hundreds of pounds makes it completely infeasible really. Most people in the UK consider it an exciting treat, not a normal mode of transport, particularly families (sod paying for 4 tickets, one is already more than the car).

I live in London and travel outside of it because I know people living all over the country, I take weekend holidays to nature, etc.

Via rail if I did the same journeys I do in the car it could easily cost me 500-1000GBP a month. Non-advance tickets are basically priced at the "no, we don't want you to make that journey" level.

The ULEZ doesn't apply to most modern cars (a 15 year old petrol meets the bar); it primarily targets the cheat diesels.

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Anyway, comparing train prices to an electric car probably isn't the model that the pricing is based on.

Many years ago, I actually complained to my MP that it was cheaper for one person to drive a not-cheap car (<30mpg) than take a pre-booked off-peak train. The response (from a researcher at the DoT) disagreed, and showed that after incorporating amortised insurance, road tax, depreciation, and maintenance cost, it was comparable. But of course this was for a single traveller; for two or more travellers in the same car, there was no additional cost.

Anyway, it's not surprising that partial costs of an electric car are far lower than taking the train.

I'm trying to switch away from driving as much as I can nowadays, but there's a reason why people do it, especially with kids that have to be places. Ultimately, I don't think it's the issue with driving - it's the issue with cars being polluting. My next car is definitely going to be electric if possible.

Now we live out in a rural area and its very noticeable how cleaner windows and paintwork are - the same also applies to our lungs!

You know a part of me did think you were about to say you had been monitoring the air in my garden, and given Facebook, Snowden, Russia, NSA and various Acts of Parliament I would not have been that surprised by one more person watching me :-)

Your sensors are going to break. Depending on the environment and the mode of operation of the sensor, you'll see between a one month and one year lifespan.

Why? Exactly because of the thing you want to measure: dust, oil particulates, water vapour and chemical reactions will quickly deteriorate the accuracy of the sensors. To properly protect them you will need at least a moisture trap and some kind of air pump to get a constant flow of air through your sensor. You most likely also want to filter out large particulates (if you're interested in sub 2.5 micrometer measurements).

That said, you can [1] get quite accurate readings from the sensors within their specified operation environment (sub 80% Relative Humidity).

[1] https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4433/10/2/41/pdf-vor

The whole lot has to be spotlessly clean for it to work, in London they clean the seats on the trains and do the maintenance work there, but the actual tunnels get cleaned once in a blue moon. The whole thing needs to be polished and polish-able. London Underground isn't built like that.

A fair amount of the dirt is from the streets above, so tyres that wear to also wear the road surfaces, that sort of cruft gets drawn all the way down into the Underground.

As for actual pollution levels then this depends on where you are on the network. TfL don't measure enough to give a heatmap of pollution, updated hourly. Your statistic from the Guardian sounds about right, generally speaking though the particulates are at 10x the EU max levels.

In a communist style country you could have an army of people polishing the tube stations and the tunnels as part of some National Service. But, in a Western Democracy where everyone has to pay a four figure sum for rent + travel no matter how they try and mix it, this isn't going to happen.

They have tried to create magic sweeper trains to hoover everything up but it hasn't been a success. Really that is what is needed as well as the trains being built to 'hoover as they go', using the air-con to filter out all the cruft.

It's a crying shame because Madrid has good public transport. It needs more investment to keep up with increasing demand, and all the left-wing parties had that in their election manifestos. Now the local government will be "investing" in cars, which benefits the few and harms us all.