Drivers in London now face financial penalties if their cars fail to meet emissions standards. While the proposal is not without merit, it is unlikely to make a difference, even if it penalizes motorists.
In April 2019, the British capital established an Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) in central London. The rule required all vehicles to meet certain emission standards. Certain vehicles, including taxis or certain historic vehicles, were exempt; for most non-compliant vehicles, drivers risk a fine of £12.50 ($15.56 USD) per day. The rule is enforced by cameras capturing number plates.
Mayor Sadiq Khan’s office called the rule “the most stringent vehicle emissions standard in the world.” Khan called the city’s air quality an “invisible killer” that is “one of the greatest national health emergencies of our generation.” At the time, Silviya Barrett, research manager at the Center for London think-tank, told the BBC: ‘The ULEZ is really needed, especially to help poorer Londoners living in high-pollution urban areas’, although the effect was ‘at first sight limited ‘. moment because of its small area.” It was later expanded to cover about a fourth of the city in 2021.
Transport for London (TfL), the city’s transport authority, expanded the ULEZ to the entire city on August 29, 2023. All non-compliant vehicles traveling within the city – including those not registered in Britain – will now have to pay the daily fine. Notably, the city already charges a daily congestion charge of £15 ($18.69 USD) to all motorists driving in central London during peak hours.
The city is optimistic about the proposal: In 2020, Khan’s office released a report showing that at the end of the first ten months of the ULEZ, measured concentrations of nitrogen dioxide were 44 percent lower than expected without the ULEZ, with an average compliance rate of 79 percent.
In February 2023, the agency released another report, showing the results since the ULEZ expanded to cover 44 percent of the city’s population. It estimated nitrogen dioxide levels in central London were 46 percent lower, and 21 percent lower in the other areas covered, than if the ULEZ had never been implemented.
But not everyone agrees. A 2021 study from Imperial College of London’s Center for Transport Studies found that the reduction in nitrogen dioxide was significantly smaller, perhaps less than 3 percent. “While other cities are considering similar plans,” the authors concluded, “this study implies that the ULEZ by itself is not an effective strategy in the sense that the marginal causal effects were small.”
In a 2022 impact assessment, the mayor’s office claimed that expanding the ULEZ to cover the entire city would result in annual savings of 214 “life years.” But Channel 4, the state-owned but privately funded network, noted that spread across London’s population of 8.8 million, 214 years of life means the ULEZ adds about 13 minutes to every Londoner’s life each year.
And the proposal isn’t universally popular with the citizenry either: last week Sky News reported that Londoners had stolen or damaged ULEZ cameras more than 500 times in recent months. In the days immediately after ULEZ swept across the city, activists smashed cameras, cut their power cables, and spray-painted the lenses.
The Imperial College survey noted that while air quality has improved overall since the introduction of the ULEZ, “the ULEZ is one of several policies that have been implemented to tackle air pollution in London…. Reducing air pollution thus requires a multi-faceted set of policies that aim to reduce emissions across all sectors with coordination between local, regional and national government.”
Limiting the emissions that cause climate change is a noble and essential goal. Ironically, the ULEZ is one of the less drastic solutions: earlier this year, the European Parliament banned the sale of internal combustion engine vehicles by 2035. The Environmental Protection Agency has proposed that two-thirds of all cars sold in the US should be electric by 2032 .
A more effective and less coercive solution would be a more tailored system where users pay in direct proportion to their output. In a 2013 Cato Institute report, Bob Litterman wrote, “Reliance on prices to allocate scarce resources is far superior to the command-and-control approach of current policies, which rely on government subsidies and mandates to certain alternatives to fossil fuels. .”