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Congestion charge to come in and cover the area surrounding the Gate.


Steve Watts

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9 hours ago, Steve Watts said:

The trouble with the Ashton Gate station is (as I understand it) that the much of the land the lines run/ran on is no longer owned by the railways or government.  There are a lot of legal hurdles to overcome long before anything can happen to open up something closer, either at the old station (wherever that was - before my time) or anywhere near.

Could a compulsory buying order not be sorted out. Like they have proposed for land near the airport. 

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5 hours ago, The Gasbuster said:

In the same boat SJ.

We received our option list on Friday, with the emphasis on plug in hybrids. Sad to see the Audi go, but it looks like Mercedes AMGe 250 to replace it. Going to save a fortune in tax !

Nice motor GB. I absolutely love my A4 petrol but the new tax methods have put me in a higher tax band so I have ben given the option to get a Hilux, saving over £370 a month. I need to do some research to see if there are hybrid options.

My guv'nor is swapping his S line black for a Hilux invincibleX while I can get the invincible so it's still a nice motor. My boss doesn't make mistakes and if it's still free to drive into Bristol due to Euro6, I may as well do it, especially as I carry a fair bit of stuff. The daft thing is the emissions on the hilux are nigh on double the Audi (40TFSi) and the cost virtually identical yet it's so much cheaper, to me, as it's a commercial.

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5 hours ago, Clevedon Red said:

I ditched my diesel company car for a petrol version on pcp for that very reason saved me hundreds of pounds a month in tax.

I'm already in a petrol CR. It would be cheaper for me to buy the car rather than pay the current HMRC bill. Sadly, my employer will only give car allowances to those who do <12000 business miles a year and I'm way over that. a couple of us did try though.

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8 minutes ago, Ska Junkie said:

I'm already in a petrol CR. It would be cheaper for me to buy the car rather than pay the current HMRC bill. Sadly, my employer will only give car allowances to those who do <12000 business miles a year and I'm way over that. a couple of us did try though.

My now ex employer did the same last year. Only essential business users could get a car the rest of us it was cash only so I opted out, handed it back then resigned anyway. But for about 6 months the difference in pay was palpable. It’s a nice perk just very expensive. 

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41 minutes ago, Clevedon Red said:

My now ex employer did the same last year. Only essential business users could get a car the rest of us it was cash only so I opted out, handed it back then resigned anyway. But for about 6 months the difference in pay was palpable. It’s a nice perk just very expensive. 

The car scheme got worse and worse over the years, very little decent value could be got for your allowance.

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21 hours ago, Kid in the Riot said:

The air pollution around Parson Street is some of the worst in the city, so no surprise that's included. 

 

Not surprised. I'm sure we are all driving to Parson Street on a match day, getting a cab back home again, and then, following the 'advice' on this forum, getting a train to Parson Street, walking from the station to the game, and then driving back home again! ?

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Now I know this is not directly comparable, or even that Bristol is proposing pedestrianising areas, but for those who say businesses etc. will be killed when the car is banned here's a really interesting piece on what happened to a borough in the east of London. I'm certainly not an eco-warrior particularly, before I'm accused of being biased!

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/waltham-forest-the-suburb-that-pioneered-the-20-minute-neighbourhood-fm0dkw6bs

I'll post article here if anyone interested/doesn't have login.

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1 hour ago, Robin101 said:

Now I know this is not directly comparable, or even that Bristol is proposing pedestrianising areas, but for those who say businesses etc. will be killed when the car is banned here's a really interesting piece on what happened to a borough in the east of London. I'm certainly not an eco-warrior particularly, before I'm accused of being biased!

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/waltham-forest-the-suburb-that-pioneered-the-20-minute-neighbourhood-fm0dkw6bs

I'll post article here if anyone interested/doesn't have login.

Please.

 

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21 hours ago, Fordy62 said:

I may be wrong, but diesels post 65 reg are ok, pre are not. Is it called Euro 6 of something like that? At least that’s what our one in Birmingham is. 

Bath will allow Euro 6 in their congestion zone, so should be the same in Bristol.

There is a lot being said about pollution from vehicles, especially fine particle PM2.5, but this report seems to cast doubts on vehicles and the most harmful pollutants. 

https://www.stir.ac.uk/news/2020/09/lockdown-did-not-reduce-most-harmful-type-of-air-pollution-in-scotland/

I believe Stirling University carry out monitoring for The Scottish Government.

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58 minutes ago, Kid in the Riot said:

Please.

 

Waltham Forest, the suburb that pioneered the ‘20‑minute neighbourhood’

 

Motorists were furious when a borough prioritised pedestrians and cyclists, but residents say the experiment is a success

 

image.thumb.png.0dd4a158e48529f93003078856268d54.png

 

The birth of one of Britain’s first “20-minute neighbourhoods” — where people stop using their cars all the time and instead shop and socialise locally — had been greeted by a noisy wake.

Five years ago, protesters carried a coffin marked “RIP Walthamstow Village” at the opening ceremony for the £30m scheme in northeast London. A local newspaper reported “intermittent scuffles, some involving umbrellas” as residents railed against restrictions on motorists.

What happened next matters, because the outer London suburb of Waltham Forest may represent the future for many towns and suburbs grappling with the problems exposed in the past six months of living with Covid-19.

The protests died away and now, as people continue to avoid city centres in favour of spending their money locally, the area is reaping the benefits of being a pioneer.

Last week Clyde Loakes, 50, the Labour deputy leader of the council whose “baby” it was, strolled down Orford Road, the centre of those protests, noting with satisfaction the stylish shops and busy cafés that had sprung up since it had ceased to be a rat run. People stopped to chat in the street and cyclists rode past without any angry altercations.

Loakes is no longer shouted down by protesters. Instead, his advice is sought by would-be imitators. “We’ve done hundreds of tours around here of people from all over the country — and across the globe for that matter,” he said.

The list of visitors includes the Olympian Chris Boardman, who is now the cycling and walking commissioner for Greater Manchester, the Paralympian Dame Sarah Storey, Sheffield’s active travel commissioner, and Anna Richardson, Glasgow’s city convenor for sustainability and carbon reduction.

“Who wouldn’t want this?” said Loakes. “Who wouldn’t want to hear the birds sing, community cohesion, improvement in our hyper-local economies? That’s what this is about.”

Car ownership in the parts of the borough covered by low-traffic neighbourhoods, which block rat-running vehicles, has fallen by a fifth to 49% of households over three years, according to provisional research by Rachel Aldred, director of the Active Travel Academy at Westminster University. The figure is about 77% for the rest of Britain.

As the roar of traffic has retreated, pocket parks and communal bike sheds have sprung up. Housing developments are appearing without allocated parking. By day, the borough used to turn into a giant car park for commuters from Essex, but Loakes put a stop to that with controlled parking zones.

“They brought nothing to the local economy,” he said. Asked what those drivers do now, he replied: “Who knows? They are not my residents. They are for other people to worry about.”

At the heart of the concept of the 20-minute neighbourhood is a “live local” philosophy in which most essentials — work, shopping, education, healthcare, community facilities, recreation and sport — should be found within a 20-minute public-transport trip, bike ride or walk from home.

It may sound obvious, but many people during lockdown, particularly those living in flats without gardens, looked with new eyes at their local areas and found them severely lacking.

Julia Thrift is the director of healthier place-making at the Town and Country Planning Association. She is working with Sport England to create a guide for local authorities to create 20-minute neighbourhoods.

She said the momentum for change was irresistible: “We’ve had all sorts of problems brewing, such as loneliness and obesity, which suddenly come to the surface as a result of the Covid pandemic experience.

image.thumb.png.5401347d31d3bee8d7470b24dfe9e806.png

 

“Over the past 50 years or so, places have been designed to prioritise getting motor vehicles from A to B as quickly as possible. That has dominated lots of decisions, shaving off a few minutes from the journey, and it’s made many places far less good to live in.”

Waltham Forest has already gone through the withdrawal symptoms of reducing its car dependency and is now adjusting to a new way of life. For the rest of the country it is proving painful. Hundreds of low-traffic neighbourhoods are being created as part of an official scheme to reduce rat-running.

The strength of the backlash from motorists, who blame the schemes for traffic jams, led the Tory-controlled Wandsworth borough council in southwest London to suspend its trials, which it said were causing “chaos”.

In Paris, Anne Hidalgo was re-elected as mayor in June. She promised a similar concept, the “15-minute city”, in which the French capital’s arrondissements would become more self-sufficient. Her adviser, Carlos Moreno, scientific director of entrepreneurship and innovation at the Sorbonne, argued that if the changes sounded drastic, that was because the stakes were so high.

Speaking in Paris last week, he said: “This region is for cars and not for humans. We need to reduce the use of individual cars and particularly diesel cars ... We need to transform radically.”

Do we face years of turmoil and animosity on every street in the UK? Christopher Martin, a member of the United Nations habitat planning and climate action group and co-founder of Urban Movement, a firm of landscape architects and traffic engineers, said many of our cities were already made up of a network of villages. But we have lost sight of that because they have become overwhelmed by traffic. Glasgow was shaped by the decision to bisect it with an urban motorway system more than half a century ago, with far-reaching consequences for everyday life. Martin, who was employed to undo some of its more harmful aspects, said: “They levelled some absolutely stunning tenements and beautiful hotels to build a motorway through the centre. It tore through communities. It was brutal.”

He recalled with pride the moment last summer when he spotted a child learning to ride a bike along the city’s main shopping thoroughfare, Sauchiehall Street, once a traffic-choked four-lane highway.

In Waltham Forest, Loakes still has his detractors, “who follow me and harangue me, but they are the same people who were doing that years ago”.

He predicted that many more of us would soon live in a 20-minute neighbourhood like his: “You can’t judge these interventions overnight. Give it 12 months to cover all the seasons, and then people start to realise civilisation hasn’t collapsed. They can live with it. They can embrace it. You have got to tame the car.”

@NicholasHellen

Everything a family needs is just a short walk away
A friend from Leeds stayed with me in Walthamstow once, writes Jonathan Dean. We did the six-minute walk to drop off my son, Ezra, at school, before strolling seven minutes to Orford Road, where we had breakfast. Eggs dealt with, it was seven minutes to the Tube. While we walked, we bumped into half a dozen people I know. “It’s like the film Paddington,” my friend said, aghast, referring to the street where everybody waves at one another and appears incredibly smug.

And I hadn’t even shown him the local Spar. It is ridiculous. The branch in Walthamstow has tortilla crisps that cost £5 a pack and a fruit and veg section that spills onto the pavement as if we were in flipping Spain. Last year I spent half my salary in there.

Earlier this year, my wife Rosamund and I realised we hadn’t left our E17 postcode for months, and it wasn’t just because of lockdown. With the playground (27 seconds from our house), Lloyd Park and the William Morris Gallery (17 minutes), a shopping centre (11 minutes), the pub (one minute), the other pub (four minutes) and the pub with burgers (12 minutes), it has been incredibly hard to work out why to go anywhere else.

The new normal, of course, has led to many saying how much they want to leave London, but I can’t think of a worse time to up sticks to the sticks. Especially when you live in Walthamstow. Want greenery? Hollow Ponds (20 minutes) is acres of woodland with trees, and lakes. Need a break from walking? The council will lend you a bike. Fall off the bike? There is a hospital (19 minutes).

Yes, there are, as with everywhere in the capital, streets in the grip of crime. However, there are strong local efforts to bridge those gaps.

We moved to the area in 2015, on the weekend many roads were shut for the pedestrianisation scheme. There was uproar from people who had lived there for years, which was reasonable. But for us, and the young professionals living locally, who mostly use the Tube, cars were rarely used.

Stay another day, the local boyband East 17 once sang. Stay another decade, more like.

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3 hours ago, Redwhitepurple said:

Good ol labour. Continuing to punish anyone who grafts for their possessions. Dirty scum

 

The London Low Emissions Zone, which is the equivalent of this scheme, was introduced in 2012 by Boris Johnson.

*Watches furious backpedalling*

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