CO2-based parking permits approved
Richmond, a borough in southwest London, has approved a parking-permit pricing scheme based on the carbon-emissions profile of the vehicle being parked. “The new plan would cut charges for owners of compact cars and raise them for drivers of larger vehicles,” according to a report from Bloomberg News. “London Mayor Ken Livingstone is considering a similar pay scale for the city’s traffic-congestion charge zone.”
Hey Toronto, what about testing this out here????
I first wrote about this back in October, when Richmond council was first considering the new sliding-scale parking fee. It’s nice to see that they followed through.
Tyler Hamilton is editor-in-chief of Corporate Knights magazine and a business columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper. In addition to this Clean Break blog, Tyler writes a weekly column of the same name that discusses trends, happenings and innovators in the clean technology and green energy market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper.
January 30th, 2007 at 5:05 pm
A great step. The other big regulatory innovation I’d like to see tried is a switch to pay-per-mile vehicle registration and pricing (I great idea I heard recently from Todd Littman at the Victoria Tranport Policy Institute.
January 30th, 2007 at 9:08 pm
Many of the other London boroughs are considering doing the same. And Manchester is considering a Congestion Zone on the London model. There’s a real domino effect going on with eco-measures.
What’s best about the Richmond plan is that (unlike the congestion charge) it’s being justified on purely carbon-emmissions terms. A first carbon tax?
However, as critics point out, it doesn’t catch people with driveways. Some are considering paving their front yards to avoid the tax. Apparently, when you’re already paying thousands extra for your car and fuel, a couple of hundred extra for parking is intolerable.
It remains to be seen whether people’s paving their front yards will make the tax more unpopular, or the people themselves.
January 31st, 2007 at 5:08 am
It’s very good news and should be a very strong driver in people’s choice of new car.
The London congestion charge is moving towards a CO2-based fee with a proposal for the most polluting cars paying
January 31st, 2007 at 10:19 am
And how such paving will increase the city’s difficulty in achieving it’s wet weather flow management plan objectives. Policies unintentionally negatively interacting. The smoke-free workplace laws creating heated patios in winter.