rmurphy195 wrote:
What they are talking about is closing the underpasses that go under all this lot - so through traffic will have to go around the inner ring road - which is already full, and will be busier later this year when the pollution charge comes in. Shame about those who live alongside it who will have theier pollution and danger levels increased.
Unhappily - for those who live or work there - the areas concerned also include areas of social and city centre living homes, student accomodation (note the need to "deliver" students with thier bags and baggage to the accomodation), all the theatres and thier associated car parks, inclidng theatres that put on amateur productions (no, I would not want my daughter to have to find her way home late at night after appearing in a show), hospitals etc. I think one of the HS2 terminals might be in the middle of this lot as well. Did I mention the Children's Hospital?
Those that live in the zone have a period of grace in which to replace thier vehicles - laughable because these are not wealthy people and have no hope of raising the money to do so.
...
All I'm saying is - the whole thing smacks of money raising and knee-jerk politics rather than a proper effort to deal with the problem - I would think differently if the infrastructure was put in place before the bans/charges rather than afterwards - or not at all.
The ring roads may well get busier, but just as the phenomenon of "induced demand" is real--where new roads built to increase capacity and thus reduce gridlock simply invite more traffic and soon thus return to gridlock--so too is the opposite, "traffic evaporation". Cutting the amount of tarmac available for private motor vehicles causes a proportion of trips formerly taken in private cars to disappear.
In terms of suggesting that those in the zone are not wealthy; this strikes me as a dubious assertion, and also as largely irrelevant. Those who have cars and live in the city centre are wealthy enough to do both things, and this tends to place them in the upper income brackets (or, at least, outside of the lowest income brackets]. More broadly, if a limited move to cut down on some of the "external costs" of motoring by asking those that drive to pay a greater proportion (note that this is a long way from asking drivers to pay the full share) of the costs of their choices, I don't see how that could be objectionable, unless you are arguing that motoring deserves large-scale direct and indirect subsidy from the public.
It may strike you as knee-jerk politics, but the reasons for taking action are clear and have been evident for years. The local and national health costs of reliance on private cars, the considerable economic costs imposed on everyone (driver or not) by policies which support and encourage car use, and the crippling environmental costs, are all abundantly clear.
I am in favour of this proposal for Birmingham, as I am in favour of their proposal for congestion charging. My only quibbles with either policy is they are not more ambitious and starting sooner.
