It is said that Nottingham is famous for Robin Hood and lace-making – well, according to reports it is now also famous for a shake-up of its city travel infrastructure.
According to Phys.Org the city’s public transport system carried 75 million passengers last year with 89 per cent of journeys being made by bus. It is all part of the drive to encourage drivers to get out of their gas guzzling cars and onto public transport. (One such policy is the parking levy, which sees businesses charge for workplace parking). The money effectively pays for public transport improvements, as stated here on the council’s explanatory website.
Part of this green commitment in Nottingham also includes stringent environmental standards for city centre buses and 49 electric vehicles operating on council-tendered services.
Further moves will see the country’s first fully electric Park and Ride scheme and a new low emission zone in the city centre.
So, let’s look at this a little more closely. For starters, charges for work-place parking are wrong in principle, and defy the vital issue of property ownership.
It’s for the owner of the land (if he wishes) to levy parking charges. The local authority has no moral right to do so (though they may have a legal right).
To say that the revenue was used for a particular purpose — in other words, that this was a hypothecated tax — is essentially meaningless, since it is impossible to establish the counter-factual. What would the local authority have spent on the buses in the absence of this tax? In reality hypothecated taxes are merely a rhetorical device to make citizens less unhappy with a tax (this works particularly well with those who don’t pay it!)
That said, however, measures to make public transportation easier to use and more attractive are to be applauded (if they are affordable). Electric vehicles may well have a place on city routes. Short journeys and regular routes with nights in the depot for re-charging are the ideal environment for electric vehicles.
While we in UKIP are not paranoid about global CO2 emissions, we certainly recognise an air pollution problem from petrol and especially diesel vehicles in cities, and if electric vehicles are an affordable solution, then I’m all for it.
Roger Helmer MEP 
Electric vehicles, so how will our power stations cope with the extra demands as the numbers increase, electric vehicles touted as emision free, yet use juice from power stations, surely a contradiction.
The manufacture of electric vehicles, particularly the batteries, must have an emission figure.
I have a personal interest in the physics of energy conversion and reuse. To charge any battery to run a car is inefficient, probably 60% or more of the energy is lost in converting energy to electricity, charging a battery, and then converting the energy back into a propulsion again. This strikes me as an inefficient ostrich situation. The National Grid transmission losses are 28% all on their own.
If we are really wishing to have efficient loss reduced transport we will need to go to a steel wheel on rail system. This reduces rolling friction and we need to recycle any velocity changes to reduce losses. Electricity generation has a major problem with energy storage, perhaps other methods need to be examined from the past, nothing seems top be happening outside of current technology. I have ideas for a wind energized gravity rail transport system using no batteries or grid power and would love to discuss it with any physicist concerned with transport.
Hi Roger, I am glad to see you are separating the climate change question from the issue of fossil fuel pollution. The positive outcome of carbon reduction will surely be the reduced toxic emissions.
To those that question the pollution created by makers of batteries and so on. You should consider which is more preferable, deisel fumes on your streets or no pollution on the streets?
A local bus company (W. Mids) has four I am told and all sitting in the depot having failed. Don’t know why. Purchase price was subsidised and result is unreliability.That’ll be teething problems I suspect? Likely short range failure is not a big issue until its regular issue? This bus company does not appear to have any competition either. I am too used to see buses/coaches charging around mainly empty and not exactly considerate driving.
Subsidy in this context is wrong including taxes to your own property. I still remember trolley buses
In the old days of trolley buses a conductor collected fares whilst the driver drove. Now the driver holds the vehicle stationary whilst he also collects fares, this transfers costs to others in longer journey times. All to satisfy the accountants balance sheets ignoring the disruption to others. Bring back ticket clippies please.
Perhaps subsidy should be only used in research and development. These days no one can develope inventions in a garden shed, one has to talk to international manufactures who demand instant profits. Research is not instantly profitable, many prefer to listen to ideas, bring in their experts to evaluate, and then go just away. Once patent protection is no longer renewed ideas can be developed and used without involving the originator. This happened on a comercial refrigeration inventions of my friends 13 years ago. His idea recovered much of the lost energy saving Super Market refrigeration costs by 10% on their £1 million annual power bill. He now lives in the USA.
Too many ideas are put into production with subsidy economics, without development in true market conditions they are based on false economics bound to end up in failure.
It would make a lot more sense to use intermittent wind power to convert water into hydrogen and use an internal combustion engine for propulsion.
Wind energy on to the grid is a farce and last week on a 38GW peak demand wind was supplying 1.02%.
How much investment has been lost in Nottingham due to businesses ruling out the location or re-locating elsewhere??
Isn’t it C02 emissions to be banned by 2021. A founder of Greenpeace says:
I observe that UK weather is not contributing or resultant of the climate change ramp (rant) up. Have tested the Central Heating rather early this year..very early!
Meanwhile, Calais still attracts little concern..well, Cameron has something said about very concerning and I think Mrs May is going to be slapped back again on repatriation/deport of illegal visitors. Business very much as usual.
Great video. Sums up the changes within Green Peace making mankind the enemy!
Ian, hydrolysis is now claimed at 87% efficient. The explosive risk is fairly high however, mixed with air one gets a large bang, with oxygen it sounds like a nightmare, or a schoolboys dream!
http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/2013/04/green-energy-cheaper-hydrogen-separate-water-splitting
They’ve been electrolysing water to produce hydrogen in nuclear boats for 50n years without serious mishap. It would be ideal for intermittent wind usage.
It never bothered me sleeping near the equipment.
C’mon chaps, surely you’ve figured out what is really going on.
Many of us have! Its how to change it though, when sadly most have not.
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If it continues to run along the following lines then the conclusion may unfold:
“So we now have a Europe where the political temperature is rising to boiling point: where the EMU elites are refusing to shift course; and where mischievous lawyers are concocting criminal charges against anybody daring to explore a way out of the trap.
This is a recipe for a European civil war”.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11768134/European-alliance-of-national-liberation-fronts-emerges-to-avenge-Greek-defeat.html
All to save a p*xy currency and the thieves that concocted it all!
We need an electric tram system all over the country.
Get Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP to stop their pleas for a second referendum (are they the EU?) and start rolling out their expensive system over the whole country. The Edinburgh Tramway, like the brilliant Cambridge tramways, must be the model for the future!
So, along with my last HMRC balancing tax demand (£2) piles of hard working families cash went here:
EU Sock Puppets (H/T Dan Hannan)
Workplace parking levies are EUSSR motivated socialist spite .
The big oil companies will no doubt find a way to slap this down…….
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3169716/Motorcycle-runs-water-polluted-river-travel-310-miles-single-litre.html
Jane just for fun google Water fueled cars, Youtube hosts many inventions to run your car this way. Much like perpetual motion machines and free electricity devices they also don’t work.
There are some ingenious inventions, however they all fail unless a hidden energy source is used.
I guess if it sounds to good to be true it usually is!