
London bans cars for a day in the fight against air pollution - known
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/london-bans-cars-for-a-day-in-the-fight-against-air-pollution-npr5jtts5
======
Jonnax
The Great Smog of London in 1952 was a 4 day smog that potentially killed
12,000 people. [1]

Today things are much better but living in pretty much any city around the
world means that you will exposed to higher pollution.

Reading the stats like below [2], it's always shocking to me that all
politicians who live in cities aren't demanding change.

" Worldwide ambient air pollution accounts for:

    
    
        29% of all deaths and disease from lung cancer
        17% of all deaths and disease from acute lower respiratory infection
        24% of all deaths from stroke
        25% of all deaths and disease from ischaemic heart disease
        43% of all deaths and disease from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease"
    
    

It's good that developments like electric cars, trains etc, mean that power
generation can be centralized. Since even a fuel burning plant is more
efficient than a car's engine.

And there's the ability to use things like wind, tidal, nuclear, geothermal
generation.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog_of_London](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog_of_London)
[2] [https://www.who.int/airpollution/ambient/health-
impacts/en/](https://www.who.int/airpollution/ambient/health-impacts/en/)

------
jarym
I agree with trying to reduce the number of cars in a city is a great goal for
congestion, safety and pollution.

BUT

Has anyone seen what it costs to get around on the tube? Or the ASTRONOMICAL
costs of train tickets if you live just outside the capital?

It costs me £8 to park my electric car in London and perhaps 40-60 minutes to
drive there. A train takes 30 minutes but costs almost £30 for a return
ticket. How is that reasonable? That ticket for ‘public’ transport is a huge
chunk of ones salary; and that’s not even adding the cost of the tube into the
equation.

~~~
IAmEveryone
Aren’t there far cheaper options for regular commuters? Here in Berlin, a
single one-way ticket is €2.60, but a monthly is around €80. That’s less than
a euro per ride for the average person that commutes by subway and uses it for
some other trip every second day.

Trains are, unfortunately, rather expensive, at least compared to flying and
to taking a car you already own. I believe fuel and vehicle taxes should
increase to the point where they pay for most if not all of road construction
costs. Contrary to popular opinion, large parts of those costs are currently
financed from general taxation.

Because tracks and stations make up the bulk of the cost of train rides,
increases in ridership have low marginal costs. Any move to get people to use
trains would therefore tend to lower per-trip costs.

~~~
leifg
Having lived in Berlin and now living in London I asked the same.

The monthly ticket that is very common in Germany either doesn't exist here or
is ridiculously expensive. Even if you go by tube on a daily basis you are
better off paying for each trip.

~~~
gcoleman
That's not true - season tickets are definitely cheaper than pay as you go if
you travel every day.

e.g. Annual Travelcards give you 12 months travel for the price of ten and a
half.

[https://tfl.gov.uk/fares/how-to-pay-and-where-to-buy-
tickets...](https://tfl.gov.uk/fares/how-to-pay-and-where-to-buy-tickets-and-
oyster/travelcards-and-group-tickets)

~~~
jsmith99
Annual tickets are barely worth it if you just take the tube, not buses, and
don't use it at weekends. Single fare prices were frozen by the mayor, but
travelcards were not.

------
zimpenfish
Already demonstrated to dramatically drop pollution on e.g. Ride100 days when
large sections of London are car free.

2017 Ride100, [https://cyclingindustry.news/air-quality-sees-drastic-
improv...](https://cyclingindustry.news/air-quality-sees-drastic-improvement-
alongside-ridelondon-route/)

2018 Marathon, [https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/london-marathon-
figur...](https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/london-marathon-figures-show-
massive-89-per-cent-drop-in-air-pollution-a3821566.html)

------
tristanperry
There's a self-build TV show in the UK called 'Grand Designs' that had a great
episode[0] whereby their children were suffering badly with allergies (even
being hospitalised at times). They stayed within London (albeit moving to a
slightly better area for pollution) but built their house with filtered air
systems and low VOC products in mind - and their children's symptoms improved
dramatically.

It's concerning how big of a role air pollution seems to be playing,
considering it doesn't seem to be a mainstream concern.

[0] - [https://www.homesandproperty.co.uk/home-
garden/interiors/des...](https://www.homesandproperty.co.uk/home-
garden/interiors/design-news/grand-designs-healthy-house-built-for-kids-with-
lifethreatening-allergies-is-a-wakeup-call-for-all-a124476.html)

~~~
toothandtail
Wouldn't it be better for a) their children and b) the environment (extra
materials being used in the house) if they just moved out of London?

~~~
IAmEveryone
High-density urban living is far better for the environment than rural. People
usually live in less space, and with far less outside surfaces, reducing
energy usage for heating and cooling. Distance to work, shopping, and other
destinations is shorter, and use of public transport is far higher. Far less
land is wasted on manicured single-family lawns rarely used. Density also
allows sharing of rarely used manufactured goods between a neighbors or via
renting (power tools, washing machines, even cars).

~~~
butteroverflow
Related podcast:

[https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2018/11/12/epis...](https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2018/11/12/episode-22-joe-
walston-on-conservation-urbanization-and-the-way-we-live-on-earth/)

------
lifeisstillgood
I was thinking of running one of these in our garden - just to get an idea of
how bad it is

[https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/pms5003-particulate-
matte...](https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/pms5003-particulate-matter-
sensor-with-cable#description)

~~~
dia80
I don't think it's that bad in your garden... I ran a foobot at home when we
had our son. Air quality in the house was good a mile or two from central
london and a few hundred meters from a big road. Looking at the pollution maps
the pollution is extremely concentrated along big roads and even a short
distance (10s of meters) away it's not so bad.

~~~
arethuza
When we lived in the centre of Edinburgh (which probably isn't even that
polluted compared to London) I was amazed at how dirty the white paintwork on
windows would get in relatively short time periods.

Now we live out in a rural area and its very noticeable how cleaner windows
and paintwork are - the same also applies to our lungs!

------
buro9
It will be worth taking a snapshot of a Sunday via
[https://www.londonair.org.uk/LondonAir/nowcast.aspx](https://www.londonair.org.uk/LondonAir/nowcast.aspx)
and comparing to the no car day.

It's a shame a week day was not selected, but it would be a bigger shame to
have this be a once a year promotional day rather than part of a learning
exercise towards reduced pollution in London.

Another link of note would be
[https://cleanair.london/](https://cleanair.london/) which brings together
many of the resources that document the current air quality and either
proposes or tracks the policies that may address it.

------
reallydontask
It's always interesting/concerning when I blow my nose after a day in London:
there is a lot of black residue in the snot.

apologies for the disgusting picture

~~~
alex_duf
This especially true if you take the tube, and heavily varies depending on the
line.

Victoria line and Nothern lines are especially bad. If you stand at one hand
of the platform, you can see some weird "mist" when looking at the opposite
side. That's just a high concentration of PM2.5 and PM10, and that's what
causes the black snot.

It's been shown the pollution level in the tube is 30 times worst than the
worst street in london. [1]

I moved out of the centre of london and commute by train partly for that
reason. Life's short, let's not make it shorter.

[1]: [https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/jan/09/london-
under...](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/jan/09/london-underground-
air-pollution-report-concerns-northern-line-particulates)

~~~
Theodores
The problem is cleaning. It doesn't happen. Compare how your former communist
country tube stations look compared to what there is in London.

The whole lot has to be spotlessly clean for it to work, in London they clean
the seats on the trains and do the maintenance work there, but the actual
tunnels get cleaned once in a blue moon. The whole thing needs to be polished
and polish-able. London Underground isn't built like that.

A fair amount of the dirt is from the streets above, so tyres that wear to
also wear the road surfaces, that sort of cruft gets drawn all the way down
into the Underground.

As for actual pollution levels then this depends on where you are on the
network. TfL don't measure enough to give a heatmap of pollution, updated
hourly. Your statistic from the Guardian sounds about right, generally
speaking though the particulates are at 10x the EU max levels.

In a communist style country you could have an army of people polishing the
tube stations and the tunnels as part of some National Service. But, in a
Western Democracy where everyone has to pay a four figure sum for rent +
travel no matter how they try and mix it, this isn't going to happen.

They have tried to create magic sweeper trains to hoover everything up but it
hasn't been a success. Really that is what is needed as well as the trains
being built to 'hoover as they go', using the air-con to filter out all the
cruft.

~~~
_visgean
No, the problem is ventilation.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Underground_cooling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Underground_cooling)

In eastern europe we have very effective ventilation - for number of reasons,
one of them is that it was built much later, the other is that some of the
station were built to serve as a nuclear shelter so they had to have very safe
ventilation systems...

------
the_mitsuhiko
Around the same time as Madrid stops its low emission zone:
[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/18/madrid-new-
rig...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/18/madrid-new-rightwing-
council-suspends-low-emissions-zone)

~~~
indalo
what even is the motivation for stopping something like that? article
describes it as very successful. so sad.

~~~
Hamuko
Was it actually popular?

~~~
otikik
Yep.

------
raverbashing
I'm going to be honest, London's pollution can be felt (and seen) in one's
airways. And it's a bit "different" than other polluted cities.

I don't know why is it so severe. Old cars? Trucks/Buses? Factories? High
humidity?

------
tempodox
Although it demonstrably reduces pollution levels, I don't see it go much
further. Too many of us are obviously willing to pay _any_ price for the
ability to sit in our own tin can while producing smog and traffic jams. Even
when not in use, cars are a massive waste of space that clogs our cities.
Until we find something that's at the same time ridiculously much cheaper,
less wasteful and less toxic, we _will_ stay stuck, clogged, jammed and
suffocating.

------
pro_zac
"Car Free Day on Sunday, 22 September 2019"

[https://londoncarfreeday.com/](https://londoncarfreeday.com/)

Couldn't find the date on the paywalled site.

~~~
Ray_Atreyu
Thanks, I was looking for it for ages

------
vfclists
The amount of political posturing and grandstanding which goes in London is
simply over the top. There are too many politicians seeking attention for
dubious causes.

The fact is that pollution in the 70s and 80s was much worse and we are still
living here. Traffic in London has greatly reduced over the years.

So where are these pollution concerns coming from? The amount eco posturing is
just way over the top.

~~~
adrianN
Pollution concerns are coming from an improved understanding how air pollution
affects people. We also used to put asbestos in everything and eventually
stopped doing that even though people weren't dropping like flies.

