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.

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.

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.

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).

> It is about how many people can travel safe

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.

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?

It's certainly a limiting factor in our small "city" of around 6500, vs. air pollution.

Yet the importance of thoughtful urban planning is often underestimated

Obligatory link to https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0intLFzLaudFG-xAvUEO-A?cbr...

Channel detailing Dutch (and other places') infrastructure design.

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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+.

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.

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 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)

> 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.

I remember visiting London and doing tourist walky things for a day thirty years ago and blowing my nose and noticing the snot was black.

Has that changed?

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.

I don't really agree but then my borough has always been the worst performing on this metric.

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.

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.

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.

/s

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.

News from Germany is that VW is closing down its German car factories. That's a huge setback. https://www.ft.com/content/f32c172b-d5e9-4397-8831-c61987380...

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.

Limehouse is way inside the ULEZ, like miles inside.

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.

> "Their annual health assessments". Is that something everyone, or maybe every student, in the UK has?

No. It's badly phrased in the article but the annual health assessment is something being done as part of this research, nothing bigger

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.

Not really.Maybe if you are over certian age, but you can barely get a GP appointment when you need it.

Wow. Savage take-down. Thank you for the close read and analysis.

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.

Maybe you're right. Maybe it is time to ban private cars in London in the name of fairness. That'd be good. Splendid idea!

How is walking to school or cleaner air caused by gentrification?

If anything it's the other way around - cleaner air making it more desirable to live downtown, leading to higher prices?

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.

> 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.

The article never claims that the children notice the emission decrease. The claim is simply that more of them use active transport to school.

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.

The poor do not live in the center of London. It’s one of the most expensive places in the world.

Reality doesn’t care about your beliefs

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?

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.

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.

Can anyone who is on housing benefit and universal credit run a car? Where would you park it, in a city where a garage costs 150k? https://www.onthemarket.com/details/15789352/

It's also one of the slowest cities to drive in: https://www.tomtom.com/newsroom/explainers-and-insights/lond... ; driving inside the North Circular is always a completely miserable experience.

Yeah, we should make all achievements of the 20th century prohibitively expensive, that'll show them.

The more mobile people will just move out somewhere reasonable, the less mobile will suffer. But that's ok, for adversity brings out inner strength.