A congestion charge with a city exemption may have the effect of building extra road and create new journeys to re fill the road.
It may be better if charging was based on every mile travelled in the centre area rather than where the journey began or ended. A congestion charge with a Edinburgh exemption would seem politically popular so surprised was not voted in but possibly not make that much difference. Cold starting a diesel in the city center is particular bad for nox
A LEZ does not have to have any congesting charges although it could do for vehicles that exceed certain pollution levels however they are defined.
In respect to NOx Edinburgh council is not currently using the levers they have. Edinburgh parking permits are based on CO there is still often an inverse relationship between low co and high nox. Although there is now electric cars they still make a small percentage of the total vehicle fleet.
When the original co changes to tax discs ( yes i know but it is pedantic), and car miles were introduced there was no Ncap electric car on sale in the uk and policy effectively incentivised diesels as was either petrol or diesel options the largest petrol truck GM v8 has lower nox than a diesel fiesta.
If nox is where Edinburgh is breaching targets then to address the problem it may be best to address the cause. The council should already have switched away from emissions based permits pricing as focused on CO typically promote more local pollution higher nox.
The council are coping the duff UK policy that labor introduced, in France and Germany diesels were grandfathered in, in the uk diesels were promoted when knowledge of the damage was already widely known putting co targets above lives.
The uk government politically may not want to crack down on diesels, there may be a number of reasons for this, many of new labour mps that choose EU co targets over public health are still in office, the officials are also still in office, the UK sells a lot of cars manufactured by abroad owned cars makers many land rover, jaguar, land rover mini rolls rolls Royce are diesel or owned by manufactures that have most of their engine investment in diesels.
I would guess part of the uk government saying are going to ban both petrol and diesel cars in 20 years is to protect diesel cars today. It may protected diesel cars today by bunching with petrol which are far less dangerous to health and setting a date in the future, makes people think already addressed and also detracts from the danger the same way cigarettes company compared their product to other products that bad but less bad, makes the worse product appear safer.
The correct solution would be to target the problem as European city are doing and ban the vehicles that produce most of the nox the diesel private cars.
Edinburgh council does not have to concern its self with the wider political implications by scrapping the permit price disparity. Bmw ( or whoever) is not going to write letter to Edinburgh to advise of loss of investment if council scrap parking permits based on co as has effect of making higher nox cars more attractive.
The council should ideally switch to pricing on nox, but as don’t have a uk gov data base for that may be too much like hard work but a single pricing may be better than a price that often offers higher nox cars a lower price. In the space of the sentence can think of a better one a two tier system that gives no exhaust cars a lower price than exhaust cars.
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