Taxi Driver Online

London touts dust glue and taxi marshals in £5m clean air drive

But critics accuse Mayor of 'greenwashing' ahead of 2012 Olympic Games

Transport for London (TfL) has confirmed that it will spend £1.5m rolling out more trials of a controversial dust suppressant technology, as part of a £5m fast-track investment programme designed to ensure that the capital meets legal air pollution limits.

TfL announced yesterday that it will expand trials of dust suppressants, which effectively glue pollution to the roads, after a pilot study showed that repeated applications could reduce particulates by around 10 per cent at pollution hotspots over 24-hour periods.

Two additional vehicles are to be converted to apply the dust suppressant, enabling the two trial sites to be expanded into more areas including sites near construction projects that face high levels of dust pollution.

However, the news has angered critics of dust suppressants, who have described it as a "silly" technology and urged the Mayor's Office to deliver longer term measures for tackling pollution, such as a central low emissions zone or help for taxi drivers to upgrade their vehicles.

The measures were announced as part of an accelerated programme funded by a £5m Department for Transport Clean Air Fund, which is intended to help the UK meet legal limits for PM10 pollution.

London already meets EU PM10 limits in most areas, but there are some local hotspots that exceed limits and could result in the city facing multimillion pound EU fines.

The pilot study, which ran from autumn 2010 to spring 2011, concluded that dust suppressants could help reduce pollution where an exceedance is close to breaking the EU Limit Value.

However, the study said that dust suppressants will fail to prevent illegal PM10 caused by long range pollution, and will work only where one of the key sources is local road traffic emissions.

In addition to the dust suppressant investment, around a fifth of the fund will be spent on fitting diesel particulate filters to buses on selected routes.

Garrett Emmerson, chief operating officer at TfL, explained that people in London are likely to start noticing the changes.

"These are measures we can introduce to target local PM10 hotspots and put in place fairly quickly and build on our continuing work to improve air quality across London," he said.

"The results of the dust suppressant trial are especially encouraging and prove that initiatives like this can work."

TfL will also spend £1.2m targeting black cabs, which account for around a quarter of PM10 emissions in central London, up to 15 per cent of which is caused by taxi drivers leaving their engines idling when stationary.

A team of five eco-marshals will visit taxi ranks in pollution hotspots across the capital to crack down on engine idling time for taxis and minicabs, while also promoting eco-driving courses.

TfL has also written to coach, bus and freight operators to encourage drivers to switch off their engines while stationary.

However, Simon Birkett, founder and director of lobby group Clean Air in London, accused the Mayor of "greenwashing" ahead of the 2012 Olympic Games, adding that the anti-idling campaign is a smokescreen to distract people "from the failure of his much-trumpeted trial of dust suppressants".

Birkett argued that dust suppressants merely mask, rather than reduce, PM10 levels, and suggested that the need for repeated applications makes it a costly way of achieving compliance, while doing "virtually nothing" to protect public health.

He also criticised TfL's decision to spend £1m of the fund on "green infrastructure", such as trials of green walls and additional tree planting, rather than air pollution measures.

"The Mayor's use of street planters, no doubt costing hundreds of pounds each, is another gross misuse of public funds which should have been spent instead on reducing the most harmful diesel emissions at their source as his own consultants told him to do nearly two years ago," Birkett said.

"The Mayor's failure to act on pollution and preference for 'greenwash' is a scandal likely to embarrass London in front of the world in 2012."

Alan Andrews, a lawyer at environmental organisation ClientEarth, argued that the anti-idling campaign should have been introduced years ago, and that the shorter term measures are "pretty disappointing".

"It seems like the government is trying to achieve legal compliance at the lowest possible cost, without doing what the directive intended," he said.

source: http://www.businessgreen.com/bg/news/2102087/london-touts-dust-glue-taxi-marshals-gbp5m-clean-air-drive

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Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
George Carlin

The 'eco marshalls' being 5 much sought after Knowledge of London examiners.

We have people waiting 80 odd days in between appearances (should be 56/28/21) and they're sending them out to ranks to advise daymen to switch their engines off.

FFS.

'We've no money' they cry, until it comes to £5m for this nonsense.