It will come as scant surprise to read that London is the UK’s most congested city. In Europe, it is second only to Moscow for the amount of time that is wasted in traffic queues.
But there is a major disconnect between this entirely predictable reality and what the powers that be are doing to tackle air quality issues in the capital.
They have placed the onus for reducing emissions on operators. In return, they offer little in terms of dealing with congestion – a major contributor to pollution.
That has caused hackles to rise across the industry, and such is the perception of unfairness that one coach operator has voiced his opinion to routeone in no uncertain terms. You can read his thoughts in next week’s issue.
What is clear is that some local authorities must realise that they are attempting to squeeze a quart into a pint pot. There are too many vehicles in cities and the air quality in many of them is poor.
Dealing with those two matters – which are immovably linked – cannot be achieved by a piecemeal of policies that in some cases conflict with each other.
Slowing traffic to suit other agendas impacts air quality. Although funding for the retrofit of equipment to tackle pollution from buses has been made available, it is neither fair nor realistic to expect coach operators to take the hit for upgrading their fleets when much of the problem has been caused in the first place by a failure to manage congestion.
It may be time for some unpopular choices to be made if this toxic combination of issues is to be tackled. And it’s important that the coach and bus industry’s argument is set out before those decisions are reached.
