Will Birmingham tax diesel cars to cut down pollution?

[dutchman]

Birmingham has an air pollution problem and people are blaming diesel engines.



The council say it's diesel powered vehicles that cause the city to regularly break air pollution limits and it's all having a huge effect on the health of the people who live there.

Assessing those health problems is fairly complex however.

The headline figure is that there are 891 deaths from air pollution in Birmingham every year.

Twice as many people die from smoking but nevertheless that's still a big number of people dying for what is, in theory, totally preventable reasons.

As ever with headlines, though, the actual story is a bit more complex than that. Let's stay with the world of transport to illustrate the point.

Overall it's relatively easy to count up the number of people who are sadly killed in car crashes on our roads and arrive at a total.

But air pollution doesn't kill people like that, instead it chips away at lots of lives right across the city.

So lots of us are losing little parts of our lives and dying prematurely thanks to air pollution.

What the experts do is add up all those lost days and weeks, arrive at a total and then convert that into the equivalent number of deaths.

That's where the 891 deaths number comes from.

It is a really useful way to compare what's happening in Birmingham to what is happening in Manchester (Manchester doing better than Birmingham by the way) but it doesn't quite mean what the headlines often suggest it does.

Also - fun fact - because Birmingham is a very young city, its residents are more resistant to the problems of air pollution which might make our pollution stats look slightly better overall.

Anyway, that's statistics and air pollution so what are the council going to do to tackle the problem?

So far they've run programmes to swap diesel taxis over to LPG and they are trialling cameras that can track bigger commercial vehicles, perhaps one day using that technology to charge them to enter the city or stop them entering the city at all at certain times.
Charging car owners?

Could the council even charge private diesel cars to enter the city? Well after apparently saying it might consider the idea... the council very definitely says it won't.

There's sympathy for people who bought diesel cars because they believed they were cheaper or even greener and for diesel van owners that are part of the delivery service we expect from so many businesses today.

Right now the council says there's "chaos" in Government about how to tackle this whole problem. The government say they've "committed more than £2 billion" to sorting things out.

Now we all wait until the spring when the council will finish gathering evidence about what is going on and the government make some announcements.

Oh, and don't forget there's no threshold for the health problems caused by emissions from diesel vehicles.

Any level is bad news.

So while Birmingham has it bad... anywhere in the Midlands there are diesel vehicles there's an impact on the health of people who live there.

[rebbonk]

I believe Westminster council is introducing a 50% parking surcharge for diesel vehicles. When and how this will be implemented I don't know.

[Melisandre]

They can tell by your registration Rebbonk if it is diesel or not .
I recall watching a program about London parking a while back having to many cars on the road then when asking the top woman in charge of it all how will they cut down on to much traffic on the roads and parking she replied there wont be the parking spaces as we will take them away.

[rebbonk]

Thank you Melisandre. I suspected they might use something like that, I guess it's just an add on to the type of system they use for the congestion charge.

The problems with diesels have long been known, which is why when the government started promoting them many of us were surprised.

[Melisandre]

No different to what the police use either on vehicles that are not insured.
I suspect they want diesel out because like you said you knew the cause of polution.

Down in Cornwall they cant afford to build a bypass to stop the polution I read the other day so areas un named at present they will make people get out of their homes and be rehoused but I smell a rat of developers with this using it as an excuse as rich areas are refusing to take in the so called refugees I read in another news also government will be forcing councils to take them in.

The future vehicles are hydro (water) and electric at present the only filling stations are down south though.

[Melisandre]

I would nt need to if they were true refugees
I have no problem with true refugees but when we are conned in being told economic migrants are refugees when they are clearly not it makes it difficult to accept true refugees when economic migrants and illegal immigrants are over stretching our vital services which I hope you find out when your children do not get treated when our nhs service hospital goes on melt down and have to refuse admission as the hospital is full.
I often wonder why years ago why was nt the untouchables who were persicuted by their own people from India being offered a place here.

May be you should check fully what the Schengen plan is.

http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/763 ... e-Schengen

Then can you tell me where in the world could any British person go and get the same offered as we give when we are persicuted.

Then tell me where in the world can you obtain a British passport which makes it easy access in to any country any where in the world. Think carefully on that one.