Reducing emissions from transport

Low Traffic Neighbourhoods are not the answer. If some through routes are blocked then the traffic is diverted to the remaining roads which are not closed. This is a very bad idea as the traffic is more concentrated in fewer routes instead of being spread out fairly across all roads. It is better not to have these schemes and let residents go about their local area in a congestion-free manner, not suffering increased air pollution.
Another scheme that is increasing congestion and worsening air pollution, are dedicated new cycle lanes taking up a third of the carriageway on arterial routes like Woolwich Road, SE10/SE7 that have very heavy traffic but are very little used by cyclists. The buses cannot pull in at bus stops, the overtaking lane has been abolished, the congestion is much, much worse, all travel times are longer, buses cannot keep to their time-tables, emergency vehicles cannot get through, cyclists do not use them as the surface is strewn with glass and other debris and the air is poisonous with vehicle emissions made worse by the traffic being bumper to bumper.

The questionnaire missed a key question: why am I not already doing the things I'd be willing to do.
Cycling: because the roads in SE London are terrifying because of cars and lorries. I also am not willing to breath in car exhausts.
Public transport: I have to run a car for mobility/large loads reasons, and I can't afford to pay for public transport on top of that, so I use my car more than I might. I would guess the same is true for a huge proportion of the general population.
Walking: this mostly involves walking along congested, noisy, smelly, polluted main roads.

Seriously: make public transport cheaper and/or free in off-peak. Pay for it using savings created by reduced traffic for business, health, judicial.

All SUV vehicles in London should be taxed and charged heavily including for on-street parking.
The ULEZ should be extended to the boundary of the GLA as soon as possible.
Road pricing for travel by private car on congested routes should be introduced.
Bus journeys that have been truncated or altered unfavourably for reaching stations and hospitals without changing buses should be restored.
There should be more bus routes in Outer London other than those which run to and from Central London.
Local hail and ride mini buses should be introduced by TfL and boroughs in outer London linking where people live to the social infrastructure and services they use.
The deep Underground lines should be less air polluted.
No diesel trains should enter London.
New developments within 10 minutes walk of a station should be car free except for disabled driver spaces and occupants should not be allowed to purchase a resident parking permit for nearby streets.
Incineration of waste should be reduced and more types of plastics should be collected by boroughs for recycling.
Commercial waste collections from high streets should be by one company, not up to a half dozen all visiting at similar times.
There must be more 'break bulk' facilities for items to be delivered and last mile or two miles deliveries should be by electric cargo bikes.
Bus lanes should be restored to speed bus journeys and make them attractive to use again and reduce pollution from road congestion.
All buses should be hydrogen powered as soon as possible.
Interchanges between buses and stations should be made easier.
All 2021 emergency Low Traffic Neighbourhoods should be examined for the adverse effects they have had and their designs should be improved.

Look at Paris, the Netherlands, Denmark, Waltham Forest, ...
Scrap Silvertown tunnel and replace it with pedestrian bridge, tunnel or cheap/free boat shuttle going West and possibly also East of Isle of Dogs.
Review all plans with respect to long-term climate and air-quality impact.
Ask why are there still new developments allowed, which change layout of streets, but do not include cycle lanes?
Instigate traffic-free days - weekend days when only emergency services and public transport are allowed on the streets.
Ban driving kids to school unless there is exceptional reason to do so.
Most importantly, no road scheme should go ahead without walking and cycling improvements built in.
Only way you get people out of cars is by making them feel safe. Waltham Forest is doing a good job on that front.
Lock in dynamic tightening of ULEZ zone as new car technologies emerge.
Invest in mobile or stationary systems for tail pipe emission testing (Why are there still cars and even TFL buses belching out blue or black smoke in ULEZ these days?)
Look at what Grenoble has done. They time their traffic lights so that there is always a red light on the next one. This sounds counter intuitive, but it works against congestion forming. How? It removes any specific choking points, where faster-flowing traffic merge together, such as access roads to high-capacity highways. Instead, the existing choking points are diminished by new choking points created at every traffic light. This means that traffic congestion has no way to form. It has the effect slowing down traffic in periods of low demand. In high demand times of the day, traffic became faster. In all circumstances it became safer than before.

I can't realistically reduce my transport emissions any further. If everyone was like me, we would have no problem with air pollution.

I didn't use the scrappage scheme. I deliberately plan my life so there is no need for a car.

I switched to EV currently, however I think that availability of public charging station is really poor.

Encouraging cycling has to go further. Active campaigns by tfl and the government. Not just put up some bollards to create makeshift cycle Lane and hope it will make people cycle. Focus has to change. This is coming from a car user, which most cyclist are. In the Netherlands, focus on building roads for cars shifted to bicycles in the 70s after protests and pressure from the public to cut road deaths. After an active campaign and a change in the way they designed roads, look what happened. It can be done. London is a different, bigger city, I know, but attitudes can be, and have to change. People have to feel comfortable taking their kids to school by bike - and how lovely would that be!

There also has to be more incentive to buy electric. The government contribution to purchase price has to be more attractive. More lampposts converted to charging stations too.

Being a working class citizen in London, trapped between ’low income’ and ‘middle class’, the ULEZ has screwed me over forcing me to move further out. With pay governmental pay freezes over the past decade, my wage has essentially been cut making life even harder. I simply cannot afford to just scrap my car and get a newer one. Public transport is far too unreliable, with my last two times taking it making me late for work due to cancellations and delays and causing me to get a written warning.

How about investing in more infrastructure for electric vehicles and promoting them instead of taxing and screwing over your working class citizens which make up the bulk of the nation.

What is your evidence for premature deaths and how premature are they anyway? I don't buy this when I know that life expectancy is high in a borough like K&C which has some of the worst air quality.

I don't believe or trust your claims over the cost of congestion and even less so when I know that you raise £800m/yr from congestion and ulez charging.

I know that when the Embankment cycle track was built, the throughput in terms of people per day was cut by a third. So, it added to congestion!!! Even worse, TfL duplicitously claimed it was successful but when I demanded the evidence, it could not produce it.

I know that since CS9 was built both the number and rate of cycle accidents has increased. So, by definition, the thing IS NOT SAFER. However, LBHF and TfL keep claiming it is, despite knowing it's not. It has jammed up Chiswick High Road to the extent that bus journey times are much longer; yet most of the time the cycle track is virtually empty.

If you look at the volume f traffic on London's roads today, it is less than it was 20 years ago but average speeds are a crawl. That shows that the congestion is not due to the traffic but by the bad management of the traffic, which is your responsibility!

If you were truly genuine on this issue, you would have got your own house in order before persecuting all the motorists and would not have had exemptions in place for various TfL vehicles!

Thanks to all TfL's and LBHF's vile schemes like bike lanes and LTNs, which are the real cause of congestion and the excessive fines and charges for parking, I have found myself not going into London in the evenings to enjoy things like the theatre anything like as much as I used to, when it was possible to drive in. Also, I have stopped shopping in the West End for the same reason. I don't like it but it is your bad, congesting policies which are to blame for me using some of the best parts of London less!

Stop the greenwash propaganda and make the traffic flow.

- Reduce the number of bus stops to make the overall bus journey faster. Right now busses are too slow to be an attractive mode of transport.
- Introduce express buses that only stop at major stops/stations for those travelling further. Making longer travellers use "local" busses slows everything down for everyone.

Don’t close off roads for a start,it causes more traffic and therefore pollution down main roads (which are conveniently the poorer areas) and contradicts the reason for putting them in. More electric car points need to be installed in every borough and help to pay for electric cars as they are expensive and people are put off for this reason. The rising cost of public transport and the lack of reliability means people don’t want to use it. The TFL scrappage scheme was a complete farce,they underestimated how many people would need it and therefore it helped about 0.5% of the people in London that needed it….absolute joke. I am a small business owner and needed the help of this scheme but I couldn’t do had to fork out £25,000 to update my vehicle to avoid this stupid ULEZ charge. To get the support of then people stop vindicating them,we pay so much money and everyone is sick to death of watching the rich get richer while the rest of us have to pay more

Cycling with manual or electric bikes needs to become the norm for mass transport with proper infrastructure for cyclists - fully segregated routes, rolling road and lane closures to other forms of traffic, more weather proof cycle parking space and less car parking space, availability of lockers and changing facilities and rental schemes for cargo bikes for moving heavy items and luggage around. Subsidising bicycles would be enormously cost effective. There needs to be an urgent increase in road space for cycle transport segregated from dangerous forms of motorised traffic and wider routes to allow mass cycling to become the default. Park and ride facilities and easier transport of bicycles on trains need to be implemented.
Electric scooters need to be urgently prioritised as a new transport method that and again given designated road spaces.
Low traffic neighbourhoods should be implemented by TFL by not allowing through traffic in residential areas from TFL roads as waiting for councils to implement is taking far too long. Camera control technology is available to do this. This would prevent Rat runs which are enormously polluting and dangerous to vulnerable road users such as pedestrians and cyclists but have become the de facto transport method due to Google maps / sat nav use.
Car licenses should be tailored with priority to disabled, families and multiple occupants (camera control for single occupied vehicles). Motor vehicles should be excluded from within 1 mile radius of all schools to prevent school run pollution and encourage sustainable transport and exercise for children and reduce respiratory diseases in children.

Stop the cars. We are hitting a level of traffic now that is a complete joke. For a start - all kids should walk to school. That alone will much safer roads.

Most people check the weather forecast every day, but I suspect that very few people check local air quality forecast every day. Making live air quality data and forecasts widely available would help every Londoner see their own exposure and take appropriate action. The Breathe London project (https://www.breathelondon.org/about) is a great start, but every Tube station, train station and bus stop should have a roadside air quality sensor and display the live data in a clear format, similar to the Tube line status displays at every Tube station.

Open up more roads let the traffic flow, lots of roads being closed and spending more time driving around adding to the pollution I have to use a company vehicle 5days a week in the construction industry so have no choice, there wasn’t much problem before road closures in various boroughs had been implemented, and bus lanes had been made 24hrs, I originally could reach my destinations faster causing less traffic congestion without have to driver longer routes to reach the same destinations.

I think most people are in agreement and want to lower emissions. Who wouldn’t want cleaner air, less noise, get to where you want to quicker and cheaper?
What makes me sad is that a lot of the policies, ironically championed by Labour, make life harder and more expensive for poorer individuals and communities.
Take ULEZ for example, who are the people that can afford newer cars? Who can afford a zero emission car? Those that are left behind are the working class and small businesses.
The other problem is that people think we have to go back to the Stone Age in order to solve these problems. Rather than come up with progressive and innovative ideas that not only solves our sustainability issues but also progresses our quality of life, the solutions that are proposed are lazy and backwards. We don’t have to go back to horse drawn carriages (walking or cycling), although it should be down to personal choice, we should push to have high tech, sustainable and affordable transportation.
Let’s look to other countries and other success stories and try to build solutions that can progress our country in the 21st century. Our economy is already at risk of being left behind in the tech race. We really need to be more bold.
Thank you.

-I agree with the focus on transport co2 emissions but I think air pollution still needs more focus. I would be more incentivised to cycle and walk if the fumes weren’t so terrible. I appreciate the efforts on the ULEZ being brought in but I am surprised how many cars and trucks are still spewing fumes despite this. Things must be better? But air quality is still poor.
-Some mopeds seem to have no pollution controls or they have perhaps been removed in some cases. I am not sure how this can be addressed but it needs to be. If the roads were more pleasant to breathe, this will encourage walking and cycling.
-There should be a focus on resurfacing cycle superhighways where needed, giving priority to cyclists at intersections (reduced wait times or more routes around traffic lights) and more efforts on safety for the cs routes.
-There should be a major push for tree planting along the cycle superhighway routes, particularly in pollution black spots. This could help with the air and emissions and also improve quality of journeys.
-There could be a way to report number plates where exhaust is clearly malfunctioning with clouds of smoke. There could be fines or requirement for MOT to be re-checked.
-the perpetual issue: public transport costs need to be lower. For a family, it is cheaper to drive than to take the train or the tube. Bring in weekend pricing or family pricing to get people out of cars and on to the tube.
-Encourage more people to use the stop/start engine feature in cars to reduce fumes.

1 Public transport MUST not be allowed to deteriorate; people should be consulted more on their travel needs in general and on desired transport proposals and changes in particular, eg bus route changes, tube frequencies.

2 There also need to be much more consultation on the highway and transport needs of older people and people with disabilities or impaired sensual and physical facility.

3 Use of all motor-assisted vehicles eg e-scooters and e-bikes in London should be restricted to people who have passed a test. It should be an offence, enforced by some sort of police force, to ride one without lights.

4 While use of private cars in London should be restricted, use of clean, low-pollution commercial vehicles should not be penalised because then we all suffer.

5 All signal-controlled junctions should be reviewed and users consulted on timings. At present some serve merely to increase driver frustration and hence reduce road safety.

6 Consideration should be given to encouraging walking and cycling (without motors) by some sort of points or voucher or financial incentive scheme.

7 Main roads should be made much more pedestrian-friendly. This has been achieved to a substantial extent in many TfL locations but much remains to be done, eg outside Waterloo Station.

A significant proportion of the increased congestion on roads is down to the shift to online deliveries/shopping: van after van after van (both overlapping delivery routes and blockages of roads and cycle paths), and endless Uber drivers cruising for fares. I fail to understand why we can implement some kind of 'last mile' scheme where the majority of deliveries are aggregated on to cargo bikes or electric platforms (milk float-type vehicles). A house then receives just one delivery a day for nearly everything they've ordered (I realise that groceries and some other things might be harder) and HGVs and large vans aren't tearing down residential streets trying to make their delivery slots. Sure, it's nice to have a 1-hour delivery slot, but is it worth it if they are scattered across the day and costing the Earth? Literally.

I'd also be really interested to see some kind of working street-level car sharing scheme which encourages neighbours to organise to share access to *more* than one car: so rather than four households, each with their own car, could we have a 'pool' where 4 households share responsibility for 2 cars, or 6 for 3? That way you mitigate FOMO (the risks of sharing only one car between more than once household) while also reducing overall ownership and usage. Car shares could be any size but should be geographically limited so that there's accountability and utility.

I think there also needs to be some real engagement work with groups that self-identify as 'gear heads' or 'car fanatics' --- how can we get them thinking about alternative status markers/care for their families' futures/etc.? Some of this can be done via progressively raising the costs of vehicle ownership (especially for the least efficient/most emitting vehicles) but it feels to me like there needs to be a positive angle as well (benefits) or it will fail to produce meaningful change.

the number one most important thing is expanding the zones that the underground system and london buses cover. no one is going to be willing to give up their cars when a) it takes already more than an hour to get from north to south london and b) half of south london is impossible to access anyways.

i (24yo) can’t drive and honestly i don’t intend on learning for as long as possible anyways, but that’s only because i’m privileged enough to not need to. i have several friends who live a 20 minute train ride north from kings cross and they HAVE to rely on cars to get them anywhere around their town. this gets significantly worse when you’re disabled, pregnant, elderly, etc.

when considering improving public transport, if you’re not helping the whole country then you’re only really thinking about the people who can already afford to ride share or pay the ULEZ fee.

London could be so much better.