I said 'poorer' not 'poor'. I accept what you say, but while everyone benefits from improved air quality the only people the ULEZ would actually deter from driving are those that can't afford a newer vehicle or the daily charge. There are no serious downsides for those without a vehicle, or those with a newer one. I don't like to see one relatively poorer economic group targetted like that.
TBH I think this is splitting hairs. Everyone is "poorer" than someone so what does this mean? Broadly speaking cars are for rich people, and they are a huge series of imposed burdens on poor people (and many others too of course). My point is that if we bring income or social status
into this, then anyone interested in social justice has to come down against cars.
This is a single, piecemeal, rather vague proposal in isolation. Tell me where the claimed 6,000 daily journeys along Atlantic Road per day are actually going to go. Are you really saying they will all just vanish without trace?
No because as you say piecemeal measures that affect one part of a journey can be bypassed but equally, the more constriction that is placed on car journeys the fewer there are. But in a highly complex urban environment shot through with rat runs it's pretty hard to measure the effect.
But the idea that all journeys are simply displaced is wrong. It's a legacy of Predict and Provide which said that if you work out what journeys are 'necessary' and then provide that road space then you've solved the capacity problem. Except that as soon as you increase capacity, you also increase the numbers of cars as drivers take advantage of the quicker journey-times. Broadly the reverse is also true; cut capacity and you cut journey numbers. People drive to a rough estimate of the journey time - the worse that is, the less they'll drive.
Again, this is general rather than specific, but go for it, I'm in favour of that, subject to impact statements on those who live and work on the main routes. Massive reductions in vehicle movements and emissions are required, and while nudging or forcing people into electric vehicles may improve air quality it won't necessarily impact road safety or, as you say, get kids walking or cycling to school. I think I'd like to see the Mini Holland experiments on a bigger scale and with greater ambition. Let's have a Lambeth wide proposal for a properly thought through scheme to massively reduce vehicle movements.
Basically agree with this - although it's highly specific not general. Filtered permeability means you choose the network of trunk roads through the city which will be for car journeys and all other roads are localised by making them closed to through traffic. That way cars can still be used but healthier, cheaper, less anti-social, environmentally better modes of transport can also be used by the majority who want to do this. It should be London wide, not Lambeth wide.
As I keep trying to say, my concern remains that closing just that stretch of Atlantic Road will have a negative overall health and wellbeing effect. No-one has yet addressed that.
As you said, it's piecemeal and therefore not going to make the big change that we need. And this is the way with transport in cities, everyone is cowering in front of King Car and so everything is done in little cowardly creeping changes instead of grasping the nettle and actually sorting this problem out. It can be done - it's the case all over the Netherlands.
But I completely disagree that it'll have a negative well-being effect, it'll make AR vastly nicer while making everywhere else more-or-less the same. And AR is a pretty key road for the centre of Brixton.
It's also one miserable, trembling little step in the right direction.
