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A toad of hot air

3rd July 2008, Page 44
3rd July 2008
Page 44
Page 45
Page 44, 3rd July 2008 — A toad of hot air
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Which of the following most accurately describes the problem?

With trucks getting cleaner all the time, will the imposition of low-emission zones around the country really bring any benefits or are they just a load of hot air? We ask the haulage associations.

Banning dirty trucks from city centres may be good politics, but whether it makes economic or scientific sense is another matter.

Five months after the introduction of the low-emission zone (LEZ) in London, there is a predictable mix of opinion concerning its success.

Gordon Telling, the Freight Transport Association (VIA) head of policy for London and the South-East, is quite complimentary about the way Transport for London (TfL) has overseen the implementation of the LEZ. For him, the problem is why it was introduced at all.

He says: "In so far as I think the whole thing was a complete waste of time, they have done quite a good job of introducing it. They've been pretty flexible with the enforcement of it. Whether or not it will do anything to reduce emissions is another matter."

Telling's argument is that trucks were getting cleaner anyway, so compelling them to do so will bring marginal benefits at best. This is particularly true since many companies, he says, will put their new compliant vehicles into London, while using their older ones elsewhere. In other words, cleaner air for the capital could mean dirtier air elsewhere.

This raises the question of whether more widespread benefits might come from encouraging LEZs in other UK cities, so that hauliers don't have the option of using older trucks in places where restrictions don't apply.

Environmentalists would certainly like to sec more schemes introduced.

Ed Deamley, policy officer for Environmental Protection UK, says standards should be national rather than local. He argues there should be a national framework for local authorities to follow, to "ensure that local schemes didn't all use different standards and procedures, therefore helping operators of affected vehicles to comply".

Lack of scale

This would certainly address one of the chief challenges for prospective LEZs in the UK, which is that few local authorities preside over areas large enough to gain any real benefit from local truck bans.

Cambridge, one of a handful of places to have committed itself to an LEZ, is confining its restriction to buses because it says banning dirty trucks would be of very Limited benefit. Joe Dicks, principal scientific officer at Cambridge City Council, says the city centre is already relatively truck-free and that pre-ban surveys of air quality indicated that the main area of concern was around the bus station.

For that reason, it is buses that have been targeted — all will have to be Euro-3 or better by next year, and Euro-4compliant by 2011. Nottingham is another city that has introduced an LEZ, albeit a gentler version called a 'clear zone — at certain times of the day, only buses, taxis and holders of blue badges are allowed into the city centre.

Not many places outside London have introduced wholesale truck exclusion zones, but among those considering a commercial vehicle emission zone along London's lines is Glasgow. However this is some way off.

The city council said in May that it will be carrying out a detailed feasibility study and begin a public consultation after that. Unsurprisingly, hauliers' associations, including the Road Haulage Association (RI-IA), are critical.

Phil Flanders, RHA director for Scotland, says: "Our opposition to the London LEZ is well known and we don't want a similar scheme here."

The reason that the RHAs viewpoint is likely to prevail for the time being is that most local authorities, after conducting research into a potential LEZ, find that the likely results would not justify the set-up costs. Few cities have as large an area to deal with as London, or a natural boundary from which to exclude traffic. And in any case, there is always the problem — as with London — that cleaning up vehicles in one area leads only to dirtier vehicles being shifted somewhere else.

The ETA's Telling believes that a better way to clean up the air in our cities would he to increase incentives for hauliers to switch to cleaner trucks. This is happening anyway as new technologies come in, but he argues that rewarding those hauliers that do choose to buy loweremission vehicles is far more likely to clean up our cities'


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