Very well written argument as ever, with lots of interesting info (e.g. I didn't know that BoJo was the one who'd come up with the scheme!). Another angle to emphasise when considering pollution and financial impacts for a given scheme is the difference between passenger vehicles and goods vehicles. Road/vehicle policy is often presented as primarily affecting private motorists, forgetting the potentially significant impacts on supply chains. How do vegetables reach the greengrocer's / supermarket on a daily basis? They come in predominantly diesel-powered vans and lorries which have a longer life-span than your typical passenger vehicle, and which, though they represent a smaller absolute number of vehicles, create heavily outsized pollution footprints (from exhaust and tyre wear). And yet everyone, not just private motorists (who tend to be the wealthier population segments), implicitly relies on them for the functioning of commerce and services. Moreover, this kind of transport cannot be so readily substituted with public transport options and cycling, or mitigated with demand reduction. One solution to this pickle is to concentrate available support budgets towards smaller businesses which use older and expensive-to-replace delivery vehicles; but I don't really know about the London vehicle population or what existing policies are in place so happy to be corrected.
Very well written argument as ever, with lots of interesting info (e.g. I didn't know that BoJo was the one who'd come up with the scheme!). Another angle to emphasise when considering pollution and financial impacts for a given scheme is the difference between passenger vehicles and goods vehicles. Road/vehicle policy is often presented as primarily affecting private motorists, forgetting the potentially significant impacts on supply chains. How do vegetables reach the greengrocer's / supermarket on a daily basis? They come in predominantly diesel-powered vans and lorries which have a longer life-span than your typical passenger vehicle, and which, though they represent a smaller absolute number of vehicles, create heavily outsized pollution footprints (from exhaust and tyre wear). And yet everyone, not just private motorists (who tend to be the wealthier population segments), implicitly relies on them for the functioning of commerce and services. Moreover, this kind of transport cannot be so readily substituted with public transport options and cycling, or mitigated with demand reduction. One solution to this pickle is to concentrate available support budgets towards smaller businesses which use older and expensive-to-replace delivery vehicles; but I don't really know about the London vehicle population or what existing policies are in place so happy to be corrected.