Hacker News Reader

Comment by arghwhat | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

How do you put 4 children into a Zoe again?

Step one would be to finish reading the paragraph, rather than stopping at the fifth word.

(Also note that the average family in the UK appears to only have somewhere between 1.7 and 2.4 kids, depending on sources.)

Everyone living in zone 1 or two is either extremely rich already or very heavily subsidized.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com