London

Drivers of the most polluting diesel cars will have to fork out up to £50 a day, to use their vehicle in central London, when new rules proposed by Westminster Council come into force.

Officials are starting a £1 million “schools clean air fund” to pay for temporary road closures outside schools.

Drivers of the most polluting diesel cars will have to fork out up to £50 a day, to use their vehicle in central London, when new rules proposed by Westminster Council come into force.

Officials are starting a £1 million “schools clean air fund” to pay for temporary road closures outside schools.

Air filters will be installed in classrooms, and trees planted to help absorb pollutants, along with other measures to protect children from pollution.

A 50% surcharge will be added to parking fees for diesel vehicles registered before 2015 and will be rolled out from September.

The levy will vary across the area, with visitors to the West End paying out £7.35 an hour for pre-2015 diesels and £4.90 for other cars.

It could see drivers parking for four hours stumping up more than £50 a day for entering central London, once the the £12.50 Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) charge and £11.50 Congestion Charge is taken into account.

Edmund King, president of the AA, said such policies amounted to a “diesel demonisation tax”, which was crude and unfair.

He added: “Many modern diesels are cleaner than older petrol models,” he said. “It would be far more effective to target the 10% of gross polluters that cause 50% of the problem. These are often older buses, taxis and trucks.”

A parking surcharge trial in Marylebone found the scheme reduced the
number of older diesels visiting the area by 16%.

Officials said drivers avoided parking on nearby streets, which cut pollution rather than displacing it.

The plans were drawn up after it was found that only two of Westminster’s 87 schools were above the legal limit for nitrogen dioxide.

Temporary road closures are also due to be introduced outside at least 20 schools at drop-off and pick-up times.

Schools will be for a share of the £1 million fund to fund road markings and signage needed for the closures.

Nickie Aiken, the council’s Conservative leader, said 75% respondents to a consultation on the surcharge supported the proposal.

She added: “We don’t want to punish drivers but the evidence is overwhelming. We need to take a polluter-pays approach. We know that transport is responsible for half the most deadly emissions in the air and each year 40,000 deaths are linked to pollution.”

Camden, Islington and the City of London are among councils that already have diesel parking surcharges.

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Ride-hailing app Kapten changed its whole image before its launch in London, but vestiges of its former life still appear when you match with a driver.

Until February, the app was known as Chauffeur Privé, and its drivers were encouraged to wear a uniform of a suit with a compulsory red tie, matching the silhouetted figure in the company logo. The French firm – which is backed by BMW and Daimler – rebranded to Kapten as part of expansion plans, with a new logo and advertising that seems to be aimed at a younger audience.

Drivers are no longer asked to wear a tie, but the company is now editing their in-app profile pictures to make it look like they’re dressed in a suit, even if they’re wearing something more casual in the original photograph.

A spokesperson for Kapten says the pictures are “processed by an in-house software” which takes the driver’s face and adds it to a “standardised bust wearing a blue suit,” adjusts the framing and applies standard filters for brightness and background. They stress that the faces themselves are never modified or edited.

The company says the process – which has been going on since before the rebrand – is designed to standardise more than 20,000 different driver photos that it receives each year, each one with different brightness levels, background, framing and view point. “The objective is to standardise a large set of pictures, which are de facto without any common features, and give passengers an easily identifiable picture of their driver,” it says.

The editing is applied to every driver photo that gets uploaded onto the app, and the Kapten spokesperson said that drivers were fully aware of the process. However, users on Uber People, an online forum for ride-hailing drivers, expressed surprise that their pictures had been changed. “Log onto the app to see that kapten have photo edited my profile picture so that I have a black blazer over a white shirt!” wrote one in a thread called ‘Lol kapten’. “I look smart,” said another.

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/kapten-london-uber-driver-photos
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 Guernsey

Introducing a tax for each mile covered by vehicles would be an administrative nightmare, according to a director of Island Taxis.

Simon Rebstein was speaking in light of Policy & Resources’ proposal that a distance charging mechanism be introduced to ensure financial contribution from all vehicles based on usage.

He preferred the old road tax system, as it did not rely on revenue from fuel.

‘Personally I think to introduce this usage tax would be an administrative nightmare and would mean increasing the size of the civil service, creating more of a burden on the taxpayer and defeating the object of its introduction.’

The usage tax has not yet been agreed and Mr Rebstein said he hoped it fell at the first hurdle.

Leon Gallienne, president of the Guernsey Taxi Federation, said he, too, was against the ‘badly thought out’ proposal.

‘If [P&R] had come and spoken to businesses out here they would probably get a better idea of what might work and what might not from the people it will hit the hardest.

‘We [taxi drivers] are struggling as it is to get more drivers, we’re working longer hours and this will put even more strain on us.

‘On a number of occasions we are being hit the hardest and there’s only so much we can take.’

Mr Gallienne thought taxing fuel would be best, although P&R has said that at some point in the future, the proportion of vehicles using motor fuel would decline to an extent that a distance charging mechanism could be used.

Martin Langlois, general manager of Ferryspeed, also said the existing system of taxing fuel was a better option. ‘Taxing by vehicle usage will have a significant effect on the cost of operation on the island, unless P&R have thought of a way to discount it for businesses.’

Ferryspeed handles deliveries to shops of food that comes into the island daily, as well as being responsible for the delivery of other goods.

‘We have no choice but to be on the road, making multiple drops, as chilled, frozen and ambient goods cannot be delivered together.

‘Firms like ours are being penalised in this situation and we are being expected to take it up as part of our costs, but those costs are becoming unreasonable [and] any future additional costs will have to be passed on to customers,’ Mr Langlois said.

He also questioned how taxing vehicles by their usage would be monitored.

https://bit.ly/31SUepd