Comment by naming_the_user | Hacker News Reader

Comment by naming_the_user | Hacker News Reader

naming_the_user

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.

https://content.tfl.gov.uk/technical-note-12-how-many-cars-a...

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.

Unless you have a car, you are completely hosed.

Yes, that tracks with my experience too. I've found some evidence to back up our anecdotal experience here: https://centreforlondon.org/blog/car-ownership-census/

Not to mentioned the cost of using the train vs driving.

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.

I have some privately collected analysis that there is large scale fraud of their already poor performance metrics. It's an open scandal.

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.

I had a chat with some older people who told me distainfully that the only consequence of ULEZ was that they were not going to drive as much.

I just hope it gains enough inertia so that a theoretical future populist Mayor cant just sweep it aside.

> ...told me distainfully that the only consequence of ULEZ was that they were not going to drive as much.

Did they not realise that's literally the whole point?

The point isn’t to stop folks from driving. The point was to stop them using highly polluting cars.

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".

Now do LTNs

Stop ubers and white vans taking shortcuts down residential streets that are being made unsafe by high amounts of traffic.

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.

Fines are discrimination against poor people, got it. They don't have those in wherever you're from?

LTN's are mostly in poor neighbourhoods, this is preventing high amounts of traffic in them.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2021/mar/02...

Or just.. use it less, and pay the appropriate fee when they do.

£10 a couple of times a week seems a pretty good deal if you're used to getting place by overground train & bus.

> 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.

My 20 year old car I bought 18 months ago for £1100 is ulez compliant. I struggle to work out what isn’t to be honest.

It’s not a barrier to driving.

Presumably this car is a small and light one - not a large truck that takes a lot of space and pollutes a lot...

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.

> Big cars are only needed in the city.

my sarcasm detector is malfunctioning today, but surely that was in jest.

Well they’re certain no good here - scratches, verges, and you want as narrow a car as possible.

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)

My 10 year old diesel isn’t compliant.

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.

The ULEZ rules were quite easy for petrol engines to be compliant, but I think diesels had to be very new

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.

Oof, steady there. Poor people shouldn't drive?

"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).

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.

Sounds like a good thing

Yep. 60+ have their free public transport subsidised by working people anyway.

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.

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