thats my point. we have been much greener without ulez.......
ULEZ doesnt make much if any difference based on stats.
The problem was delt with by making petrol greener and reducing the need to burn COAL
London pollution & ULEZ
- Thread starter jonneymendoza
- Start date
ULEZ doesnt make much if any difference based on stats.
The problem was delt with by making petrol greener and reducing the need to burn COAL
Caporegime
Elec usage peaked in 2005 too. I do miss my old 120W incandescents though!
Breathe London
www.breathelondon.org
Looking here, and eyeballing a a few places near me from august 22, to present date, one looks not disimilar on pm2.5 but a slight reduction on NO2, the other looks like a slight reduction of pm2.5 and similar NO2 when comparing winter '22 and winter '23. Overall, where the differences seem to show, they graphs seem to be less 'spiky' too.
That said, there will be differences due to weather and people burning stuff.
All in all, anaylsing whether ULEZ is good or bad will be harder than one guy rocking up on one day and taking some results.
Even out where I live, mostly rural, it was like night and day difference - without any doubt the air was fresher and it was easier to breathe - was also fascinating just how quickly nature started taking hold again and even seeing animals playing in the road it was that quiet.
Commissario
It sort of horrifies me to realise how much we used to use on lighting.
Our living room alone had between 500 and 600 watts of standard bulbs, mainly because my dad's eyesight is/was bad enough he needed really good light to read. Now we've got better lighting at about 30 watts.
Soldato
ULEZ is in place to take more from the tax payer, it has never been about people's health.
Soldato
The house I live now had 19 x 50W GU10s between the kitchen, downstairs bathroom and main bedroom. They were replaced within a week of moving in as were all the old spiral energy saved bulbs which take an age to come to full brightness.
Still have a couple of non-LED fluorescent tubes in the loft and one in the cave under the house, but they only get used occasionally for very short periods.
Still have a couple of non-LED fluorescent tubes in the loft and one in the cave under the house, but they only get used occasionally for very short periods.
Passenger air travel globally was significantly down, its about back to pre pandemic levels now.
Now compare how many people a victoria line train can hold, and how many a car can hold. Now compare the Victoria line to the District line and ask why? Now ask why is the Victoria line compared to a roadside and not say the Dartford or Blackwall Tunnel? Not that I think they'll be worse than the Victoria Line.
As ususal, things are a little bit more complicated than tube bad car good.
Or are you suggesting we convert all london underground lines to maglev? Because that'd be fab.
Facts are facts, the stuff u breath underground is more dangerous to your lungs then what you breath in a air filtered car or just walking in the street that has u know natural fresh air where most vehicles have greener petrol and some electric..
The gimp deserves a hue bulb too.
Indeed, lets make all the underground lines as clean as the District line, since it's cleaner than roadside readings. I'd also point out, the tube trains have filters on them too, it's just people open windows because it's hot - another issue with the tube, it's ever increasing temperature, which will need to be addressed.
Electric vehicles, IIRC, can actually have more particulate matter due to weight of the car, but it also depends how much people also use or don't use regen braking. From memory I read an article about the tube trying to employ more regen braking but annoyingly I can't seem to find it on google.
Commissario
IIRC LU do try to clean the underground but it is very hard to do because of the need to keep it running, and the build up is because there is in some cases 100+ years of baked in muck* that gets disturbed plus the daily stuff and very little ventilation.
As Loftie says IIRC the trains have filters, but you're also generally only exposed to the underground for quite short periods of time whilst you're exposed to "sideside" pollution pretty much all the time when moving about or in any building that has open windows as opposed to filtered air conditioning (and there are a lot of residential properties running just a few meters away from busy roads).
*From memory they send cleaning crews down every night who are shifting not only "recent" surface muck, but also trying out new/better ways to both get more of the recent muck out faster, and some of the ancient stuff. The problem is they can only do a very limited amount of track/tunnel per shift and the passage of air as the trains run means it almost immediately gets dirty again as muck shifts with the air.
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They are and they do. I'm fairly sure they've also mentioned air conditioning coming to the smaller trains, which at one point it was said it wouldn't be possible. The victoria line is pretty bad though - I can literally smell/taste the metal, though it used to be worse. Platform pollution could be reduced if they could put the platform barriers everywhere, but I don't think that's possible unfortunately. Which is a shame also because how crowded the platforms can get.
I'm intrigued how they're going to try and tackle the heating issue because essentially the tube acts a bit like underfloor heating. And with the night tube there's even more time that heating is taking place. But that's off topic.
Commissario
At the risk of going off topic.
The heating issue I can potentially see something like heatpumps/pumped water systems with effectively reverse radiators, the technology in general is old hat, the problem would be how to do it and making it economical. I'm guessing if they could run pipes parallel* to the tunnels (although that'll be fun to plan out) if they don't have space in the tunnels and effectively cool the ground around them as the temperature differential is probably significant enough to make using it to provide heat or preheat water going into buildings possible.
Even "just" using something like AC in the stations but with the waste heat being used to warm water (or another fluid) going to say buildings overhead or across the street could be viable as you'd not be paying just to cool something down, but using the "waste" heat to warm something up that needs it, in the same way that some place use waste heat from industry to warm nearby public buildings.
*Or even take advantage of some of the disused tunnels that are still connected and get airflow to try and pull as much heat out of the air as it passes through as possible, although that wouldn't be anything like as efficient as directly pulling it out of the soil.
I think the issue is the lack of space in the tunnels. You'd also need to do a lot of work which would, at a guess, cause massive disruption to the tube network. It'd be nice if they could use the heat for some form of district heating, though I suspect the best way would be to do the AC in the stations as you mentioned. Though I'm not sure if it'd be enough to stop the tunnels themselves heating up. It'll be interesting to see how they tackle the issue. But yes, we're getting off topic
Soldato
“It puts the lotion on its skin or it gets the hose…”