What do you think of this?

[Bluebottle]

http://www.channel4.com/4car/news/ne...=15637#article

your thougts please

[touringlegend]

They should get rid of those stinking double deckers first. I bet there's some of them first registered pre-1993 too.

[mad4mins]

how are they going to enforce that?? lol,, just buy a private plate..

[touringlegend]

A private plate doesn't stop the authorities knowing what year it was registered..

[Tim Falce]

They're doing that in London with trucks and buses. After 2010 (I think) anything that doesn't meet Euro 3 and Euro4 emissions will have to pay a £200 per day charge to drive within the M25 boundries.
I wonder how long before it's rolled out to cars as well.

[Suze]

I was speaking to someone last night who said 80% of a car can easily be scrapped but the other 20% is harder. Surely it's better to try and raise the % of a car that can be scrapped first rather than people dumping their older cars because of the C02 emissions? Let's face it, many people don't need a new car every few years.

[Dennis.Doyle]

Hmmm, Edinburgh do seem rather keen on keeping vehicles out. I’ve no idea how much of the motivation is reducing pollution & how much is removing congestion as they have toyed with the ideas of congestion charging & banning 4X4s already.

Either way, wouldn’t we all like to see less cars on the road, but preferably other peoples? Personally, I’ve really never understood why enthusiastic motorists aren’t keen to incentivize the less enthusiastic to take the train, bus, bike or whatever.

FWIW The SMMT reckon the CO2 emissions through a vehicle’s life-cycle are 10% manufacturing, 85% use and 5% disposal. However, just possibly they have a vested interest in flogging us new cars as often as possible?

I just like to keep my cars a long time, not because I’m particularly green, but because I don’t like throwing perfectly serviceable things away. Since the major manufacturers largely abolished tin-worm & engine wear I’m hoping my current one will be good for at least 20 years.

[garcon]

Anyone who's been to Edinburgh knows what causes the real traffic pollution problem - fleets of ancient, clapped out sightseeing buses. Can't see them banning them can you?

[ScotsBrutesFan]

Princess Street has been closed off to "private" cars for a number of years now, with only Buses and Taxis allowed on it.

Yet it's as difficult to find clean air there now than it was before.

As has been said, priority one should be cleaning up the output from the Buses and Taxis especially as these are the ones sitting at the kerb with their engines running, beltching nasties straight out into peoples faces.

[krt917]

I have several problems with this sort of policy. Firstly, as usual, it's a minority group that's being picked on when one would have thought that there would be a much bigger impact if, say, more stringent regs on new cars were implemented. And seeing as a reasonable percentage of pollution coming from the motor industry is created during the production and disposal parts of the process, shouldn't we be encouraging people to keep their cars longer and not just get a new one (ah, but then of course we'd be upsetting big business)?

Secondly, many people can't afford new cars so basically we're penalising poorer people and letting more wealthy individuals - whether they're driving a Prius or a gas-guzzling 4x4 or American V8 - get off completely.

Finally, what percentage of cars on the roads are old? What percentage of car pollution comes from them? I don't know the answers but suspect they would be interesting.

[Craig]

I honestly really don't remember there being a problem with pollution in Edinburgh. Though, if there was, I'd certainly agree with the suggeston it was primarily caused by those bloody open top sightseeing buses!