A new push to help London's motorists switch to EVs
Discussion
"The paper, titled 'The Evening Standard roadmap for driving the electrification and decarbonisation of London’s transport', called for a series of essential interventions, including:
Removing VAT on public chargers.
Capping premium rates on rapid chargers.
Outlining the importance of hitting 2030 targets for improving air quality and the need to go electric.
Devising an Oyster-style card giving Londoners access to all charging points and a flat rate across the city.
Educating Londoners about how and where to charge electric cars and building confidence in the charging network.
Overcoming resistance to electric vehicles by encouraging test drives.
Making it easier for companies to build chargers — and harder not to.
Removing petrol and diesel cars from London as soon as possible.
Lobbying for the reinstatement of electric vehicle subsidies.
Growing the second-hand market to make electric cars more affordable."
Source: https://www.standard.co.uk/optimist/plug-it-in/plu...
Removing VAT on public chargers.
Capping premium rates on rapid chargers.
Outlining the importance of hitting 2030 targets for improving air quality and the need to go electric.
Devising an Oyster-style card giving Londoners access to all charging points and a flat rate across the city.
Educating Londoners about how and where to charge electric cars and building confidence in the charging network.
Overcoming resistance to electric vehicles by encouraging test drives.
Making it easier for companies to build chargers — and harder not to.
Removing petrol and diesel cars from London as soon as possible.
Lobbying for the reinstatement of electric vehicle subsidies.
Growing the second-hand market to make electric cars more affordable."
Source: https://www.standard.co.uk/optimist/plug-it-in/plu...
The biggest obstacle to me seems to be the patchwork of boroughs, all with different levels of competence and will to install chargers. I used to live in Southwark - there was loads of lampost chargers popping up nearby. I could imagine owning an EV there. Now I live in Haringey - the situation is far, far worse. There's no way I'm buying an EV when the ratio of public chargers to cars near me is about 500:1. The council are installing a handful of chargers each year - but there's 270,000 people in the borough.
You can draw a pretty good map of London boroughs just by tracing around the bits with dense charger networks. That's obviously a political failing. It's ridiculous since living in inner London means being subjected to worse air quality - if anyone should be doing everything possible to reduce the number of ICE cars on the roads, it's us.
The only people who park outside my house on a regular basis are either me or my immediate neighbours. If the council were forward thinking they'd allow people in terraced houses to fund pavement gulleys and private chargers - that would reduce the number of cars needing to regularly use public infrastructure. I could imagine sharing it with a few of my neighbours as well.
You can draw a pretty good map of London boroughs just by tracing around the bits with dense charger networks. That's obviously a political failing. It's ridiculous since living in inner London means being subjected to worse air quality - if anyone should be doing everything possible to reduce the number of ICE cars on the roads, it's us.
The only people who park outside my house on a regular basis are either me or my immediate neighbours. If the council were forward thinking they'd allow people in terraced houses to fund pavement gulleys and private chargers - that would reduce the number of cars needing to regularly use public infrastructure. I could imagine sharing it with a few of my neighbours as well.
But all this 'make installing chargers easier' talk flies in the face of implementing VxG, which pretty much implies restricting the choice of chargers etc.
A lot of the other stuff costs money, and there is a limit to how much subsidy people want to throw at the relatively wealthy people who can afford an EV.
The other thing is, even if all IC cars get replaced by EVs, the traffic and congestion problems remain.
A lot of the other stuff costs money, and there is a limit to how much subsidy people want to throw at the relatively wealthy people who can afford an EV.
The other thing is, even if all IC cars get replaced by EVs, the traffic and congestion problems remain.
Most of those are carrots for the EV owner/potential buyer, which will cost someone who isn’t the EV owner/potential buyer money. The trick isn’t to come up with the list - it’s to pressure the affected parties to give up their cash to make them work.
The one point about removing petrol and diesel cars is a stick. That ought to follow as a natural consequence of the carrots working. It looks a bit incongruous.
There are a lot of petrol stations in London. It would cost a pretty penny to convert all of them to EV charging stations, I’d imagine.
The one point about removing petrol and diesel cars is a stick. That ought to follow as a natural consequence of the carrots working. It looks a bit incongruous.
There are a lot of petrol stations in London. It would cost a pretty penny to convert all of them to EV charging stations, I’d imagine.
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