• 3 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • You misunderstand the statistic. The 90% compliance measures cars that were driving into a future LEZ area. There was no need for any of those vehicles to be compliant at the time of measurement. The measurements were performed to analyse the impact that the new LEZ would have when introduced.

    Additionally, I think it’s extremely misleading to say that you need to buy a new car every eight years. In this case, you might need to buy a used car that is already eight years old (or much older if petrol). They are not expensive compared to new cars. In the case of London there has also been a scrappage scheme to assist people, though this probably isn’t available everywhere.


  • Where is there an LEZ that forces you to buy a ‘new car’? The ones I’m aware of require compliance with either fairly or very old emissions standards.

    For example, in London, the ULEZ requires that petrol cars be Euro 4 (every UK vehicle since 2006 complies automatically) and diesel cars to be Euro 6 (mandatory for new cars since mid-2015). So, worst case, the vehicle needs to be newer than eight years old. More than 90% of vehicles driving into the expanded ULEZ area were already compliant before it became active.





  • Car-centric cities waste tonnes of space on parking which sits empty most or all of the time. Improving them requires less knocking stuff down and more filling in the gaps.

    Luckily your city doesn’t have to pay for this - since property developers will do it for you to make money for themselves. You just need to fix the regulatory barriers: remove parking minimums and legalise mixed-use zoning.

    If you want to accelerate the process, your local government can adopt the Japanese model: build rail or light rail and then develop dense areas around or above it. This is generally profitable but requires taking on a decent amount of initial risk.

    So it can be done. But sitting around grumbling about how a better future is impossible because everything has to stay how it is right now won’t get us there.