Sadiq Khan’s ULEZ expansion had NO impact on air pollution
Sadiq Khan controversially expanded London‘s Ultra Low Emissions Zone two years ago, at an estimated cost of up to £155 million. Now, a breakthrough study suggests that fervent opposition at the time was well–judged
Scientists at the University of Birmingham say the expansion of the ULEZ in August 2023 had no significant impact on lowering air pollution.
In addition, London still faces air pollution levels well above international health–based guidelines, according to the experts.
Campaigners are now calling for ULEZ to be scrapped altogether as it is saddling ‘Londoners with mountains of debt’.
‘This is just further evidence that the ULEZ expansion was about raising money rather than improving air quality,’ Thomas Turrell AM, Transport & Environment spokesperson for City Hall Conservatives, told the Daily Mail.
‘This is exactly what TfL’s own modelling showed, but yet again, Sadiq Khan is ignoring the evidence when it doesn’t suit his agenda.’
Damning figures released in 2023 showed how the ULEZ expansion generated a whopping £5.3 million in its first week alone – with millions more raked in from drivers since.
Introduced in April 2019, ULEZ allows authorities to charge diesel and petrol vehicles £12.50/day for operating in London if they are not compliant with emissions standards.
It uses a network of cameras that snap a photo of a vehicle’s plates, which searches a database to check if it is compliant, and, if not, issues a fine to the owner.
ULEZ was intended to reduce vehicle emissions in some of London’s most polluted areas, but the decision to expand it to areas where traffic is less dense two years ago proved controversial.
It means the ULEZ now applies to all 32 London boroughs, covering over 1,500 square kilometres (580 sq miles) and around nine million people. The zone pushes right up to the borders of surrounding counties including Kent, Surrey, Essex and Hertfordshire.
The new University of Birmingham study focused on two harmful pollutants called nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and PM2.5 – which refers to fine particles with a diameter 2.5 micrometers or less, invisible to the naked eye.
NO2 can lead to health issues like inflamed airways while aggravating existing heart and lung diseases, while PM2.5 can enter the lungs and then the bloodstream, lodging in the heart, brain and other organs.
The team studied air quality data captured hourly at 124 sites across London following the introduction of ULEZ in April 2021, and its major expansion in August 2023.
They also created a computer model for assessing the direct impact of ULEZ on these pollutants in the Greater London area. According to the findings, there was a 19.6 per cent reduction in NO2 at roadside sites in central London within three months of ULEZ originally being introduced in 2019.
Meanwhile, nitrogen oxides (NOx) – the wider group of toxic gases to which NO2 belongs – fell by 28.8 per cent in the same period for the same area.
However, no significant impact was detected on NO2 or NOx levels following the ULEZ expansion in August 2023. What’s more, PM2.5 pollution across the whole of London has not significantly fallen over the entire period – not just since 2023.
Unfortunately, NO2 and PM 2.5 (fine particles that can enter into our lungs) pollution in London remains well above guidelines from the World Health Organization. Study author Professor Zongbo Shi at the University of Birmingham admits the ULEZ expansion of August 2023 has had a ‘limited effect’ on London air quality.
He claims this was because London drivers by that point had already largely switched to eco-friendly electric vehicles and newer petrol and diesel cars that are ULEZ-complaint.
‘Commitments to expansions may have encouraged earlier transitions to cleaner vehicles, which likely explained the limited additional impacts of 2023 ULEZ expansion on air quality,’ Professor Shi said.
In response to the findings, Mr Turrell refuted the assumption that improved air quality in London is due to the ULEZ.
He told the Daily Mail:
‘Air quality in outer London was already improving because of things like our amazing green spaces which he now wants to concrete over, not because of his policy of inflicting misery on millions.
The least the Mayor could do is use the cameras to do something helpful like tackle the epidemic of car theft in our outer London boroughs.’
Councillor Colin Smith, Leader of Bromley Council, called the ULEZ a ‘cynical tax raid on outer London’s motorists‘.
He thinks the study confirms original concerns aired in 2023 that ‘an expanded ULEZ would be minimal in terms of air quality. Had it been about air quality, Mayor Khan would have started where the air in London is dirtiest – in his own tube network, but no, there were no motorists to fleece there,’ he told the Daily Mail.
‘The reality is and was that Bromley had good air quality from the outset, amongst the very best in London, with ULEZ being an unwelcome regressive tax which remains deeply unpopular and divisive to this day.’
Overall, the study, published in npj Clean Air, concludes that the ULEZ alone is not enough to make London’s air quality safe for breathing (by inference this means they consider London’s air is currently not safe to breathe. Should we evacuate the city? – Ed), despite promising reductions in nitrogen oxides coinciding with the first few months after its initial 2019 implementation.
The authors call for further action especially to reduce PM2.5, which not only is released from a vehicle’s exhaust but also by tyres pressing against roads. (Tyres ‘pressing against roads’, by which they mean cars, and shows they are in fact part of the war against the motorist – Ed)
See more here dailymail.co.uk
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