USELESS ULEZ - Choked? Has Sadiq Khan's flagship policy saved lives, or harmed livelihoods?

0:00You know, NASCAR fans appreciate a good pit strategy. The best teams are always looking for ways to make things faster, smoother, and more efficient. But buying a car? Most of us think that it's going to be a long, drawn-out process. I did too. Then I found out you can actually buy a car online on AutoTrader. Really. I started the way most people do, searching inventory, comparing options, narrowing things down. But then I realized I could do way more of the process online than I expected. Get details, explore financing options, connect with a local dealer, and continue moving through the buying process from wherever I happen to be.

0:34And here's what surprised me most. You're still not doing it alone. Real dealer support is there if you need it, which gives you confidence every step of the way. Plus, you're in control. Want to do everything online? Great. Prefer to handle some parts in person? That's an option too. It's buying a car your way. So if you're in the market for your next ride, check out the huge selection available on AutoTrader and see how simple the process can be. Buy your car online on AutoTrader. Really. Visit AutoTrader.com. Hey, Chicagoland. Wayfair's Black Friday in July sale is coming to the Wayfair store.

1:09From July 23rd through 27th, you can score up to 80 % off everything home in person. like up to 80 % off area rugs, up to 60 % off outdoor furniture, and up to 60 % off mattresses. Take home the small stuff that day and get the big stuff shipped fast and free right to your door. Shop the sale July 23rd through 27th at the Wayfair store at Edens Plaza in Wilmette. Wayfair, every style, every home.

1:45Hello and welcome to the Everything Electric podcast. I'm Helen Cheresky and this week our podcast is all about EULAs, air pollution, what's in the air we breathe, especially, I mean, I'm a Londoner, I walk around, cycle around the city, I'm breathing air in all the time and I do think it's getting better. There's a good news story to be told. So this week I've been talking to Dr. Gary Fuller, who is an air pollution scientist at Imperial College London. He's done lots of other jobs in UK air quality stuff, and he's been monitoring London's air for a long time now. And so he can see the stuff that the rest of us can't really see.

2:24You know, if it's really filthy, we can probably tell. but actually there's a lot of techniques now which allow really fine detail on exactly what pollution is where and what it's doing and where it's coming from and of course this feeds into things like the ULES the ultra low emissions zone which has been controversial even though I kind of think clean air shouldn't be controversial but anyway so we've had a really interesting discussion about air pollution about ULES about London how air pollution works in big cities and what matters and the health impacts of ULES, which are really impressive.

2:59I mean, I'd heard a few of the numbers before, but the things Gary had to say about how much difference ULES and other schemes make are just, they're colossal. I mean, as he pointed out, if you had a medicine that reduced hospital admissions by that much, everybody would be crawling over themselves to get it. The impacts really are dramatic. So yes, so we had a great conversation and actually left me feeling quite optimistic about the future for things like EULAs and air pollution. So, yes, great podcast to look forward to. And before we get into it, here's a quick ad. Our three free YouTube channels on EVs and clean energy tech are funded by our fun-packed, test-drive-tastic events in the UK and Australia.

3:46Next up, Everything Electric Greater London and then Sydney. All events include a B2B EV day and commercial vehicles too. Gary, hello and thank you for joining us on the Everything Electric podcast. So I've met you quite a lot over the years in lots of different contexts, but just for the listeners and watchers who may not have met you before, just give us a little overview of what it is that you do. Yeah, hi Helen, thanks for asking me along. It's great to be back on the programme, having been on one of your predecessor ones. I'm an air pollution scientist at Imperial College London. I've spent over 30 years measuring air pollution, urban air pollution, mostly in London.

4:30And I would say my research interests are on urban air pollution, how it's changing and then how it affects our health. And how do you get into that? Because it does sound a little bit, it sort of sounds a bit depressing to work on. It's obviously really important. But how do you get started in all of that? um a long time ago uh it's it's it's really weird i've got a job that's lasted 33 years and originally i was taken on in a two-week position um there was uh an opportunity well there was a need for someone to help to compile a database when the london air quality network was first being built and uh someone said to me you know look you're between jobs do you want to come and do this.

5:12So I went along for two weeks. And then 33 odd years later, I've managed to get a PhD, you know, an academic position. So it's worked wonderfully. Very good. So I live in London. And so I do think quite a lot about the air I'm breathing as I'm cycling and walking around. And what's interesting to me over time, and we'll get into the details of this is that I hear people say now, in fact, Robert Wellen has said it to me. He said, you know, you used to go into London and, you know, you would feel, you would come out and you would feel dirty basically. And now you turn up in London and you kind of go, oh, you know, I, you know, it's a normal place.

5:57I don't come away feeling like I've been sullied by the filthy capital. Just on a big, in a big headline picture, has, is it true that air pollution's got better? And if So how much by? Yeah, I mean, air pollution in London's improved a great deal. Of course, you know, it's the 70th anniversary of the Clean Air Act. If you would go back to the 1950s and the smogs we had then, then clearly London is far, far better than that. We don't get these pea super smogs where people can't see their feet anymore. And, you know, several thousand people die because of each of these during the 1950s and 1960s.

6:34even if you were to go back when I was a kid going into London in you know the 1970s 1980s I agree with Robert's point I used to come out feeling you know as though I was kind of like sticky if you've been into central London you blow your nose and sounds a bit yuck I know but quite obviously you would see you know black soot from just the density of really poorly controlled diesel vehicles that were in the centre of the capital. More recently, there's been, I suppose, London's air pollution has, well, it hit a period in the 2010s when we really weren't making any progress at all. There've been a lot of changes in the early part of the century.

7:19Power stations in and around the capital that were burning coal had largely been closed, the ones down along the Thames. That led to some improvements. But what we experienced was a worsening in traffic pollution. And we hit a point in the 2010s when really nothing was happening. It wasn't getting any better at all. With my colleague Anna Font, I did a study between London and Paris that looked at 2010 to 2016. And we looked at the rate of progress at that time. And we concluded that it was going to take 193 years for London to meet the legal limits that it should have met by 2010. So we were in a pretty bad place.

8:04And then along came new initiatives such as the T-Charge and then the ULES and London has transformed. It honestly has. We will get onto the ULES. I mean, that's the bit of this that hits the headlines, isn't it? So we'll come on to that in a little bit. But just, you know, we all think of, let's just do a little bit of what the pollution is. Because the thing about pollution, I find, is that it's one of those things that it's sometimes really hard to talk about, especially on TV, because it's kind of invisible, you know, like, unless you are snotting it out of your nose in some disgusting way.

8:44it's very like if you just walk out you can't see what it is right it's invisible so just give us a quick rundown of the types of pollution that matter in a big city like London and then we'll get on to how you detect them but tell us what's there first. Yeah so if you step out into London you'll be breathing air pollution from a whole variety of sources and I think if you go and talk to the you know the average person in the street and you talk to them about air pollution it's going to take them about 30 seconds before they point to the nearest busy main road and then their point to diesel traffic and that's been the story of I suppose the last 15 to 20 years has been this real emphasis on air pollution from the exhaust pipes of vehicles and mainly from the exhaust pipes of diesel vehicles but our cities are changing a lot and these vehicles are changing a lot as well.

9:40So now we're finding ourselves worried about air pollution sources that we've kind of overlooked for quite a long time. There's been quite a return to solid fuel burning in our urban areas, not just in London and the UK, but across Europe. And that is one of the major sources of particle pollution that is produced inside London. So that's wood-burning stoves, is it? um well it's it's not just stoves um but there's quite a lot of people there in london especially uh that are burning wood are doing so on open fires and they're much more polluting than stoves stoves are polluting as well we have to emphasize that um it is wood but also there's a certain amount of smokeless fuel being burnt as well because there's only a certain amount of wood to go around you know it's it's hard to get it um and that's leading to really quite substantial amounts you know perhaps as much as a fifth at some times of the air pollution of the particle pollution that's being produced uh in london other sources within the city include stuff like uh combustion uh sorry construction but a lot of our pollution uh at least in terms of particle pollution so we're talking really tiny particles you might have heard about pm 2.5 so these are things smaller than about 2.5 microns that can penetrate quite deeply in your lungs and further in the body.

11:05And a lot of them come from outside the city. And some of the biggest sources for that is the countryside. And we think about the countryside as being a place that's clean and fresh and really positive. But a lot of ammonia is produced by agriculture. And so if you look at the particle pollution that you were to measure in London they say averaged over a year and if you were to weigh it somewhere in the region of about 40 percent of that would be ammonia and around half of that would be other chemicals that can tell particles that contain ammonia it's a really big source and I think it's overlooked it's really worth emphasizing that bit about the size isn't it because there was always you know we're just dwelling perhaps too much on the disgusting blackness you used to get in your nose.

11:59But the point is that the big bits of pollution, the really big bits, could get caught by things like the hairs in your nose, but the smaller things are, the further in they get. So the more insidious it is. That's kind of the game. So you get rid of the visible big stuff, but actually then once you start worrying about the tiny stuff, it often sounds quite a lot more concerning, I think, because it's burrowing its way in. If you think about tiny particles, they can actually go beyond the lungs and translocate into other parts of the body. So that's an additional concern once they get small. Also, our pollution is less black.

12:34So it used to be diesel soot. It used to be coal soot. You'd blow your nose and see it. Nowadays, our pollution is less black. So what colour is it now? A lot of it, if you think about what comes out from wood burning, for instance, is brown. uh okay if you take a filter you know we sample air pollution in london you suck air through onto a filter and you know then you can weigh or analyze it but the filters that we have during uh the winter time and weekends and winter time they're not black they're generally brown and that comes a lot from woodland amazing okay well let's come on to the measurement because i I have visited, there's a couple of states, well, yeah, I know the Air Quality Network measured across London, but there's one particular place I've visited at least twice, which is on Marley Boat, is it on Euston Road?

13:33That's right, opposite Madame Tissot's. And it's this thing, and it's really clever because I swear 99 % of everybody who walks down that street doesn't see it's there. And yet when you actually look at it, it's the size of a shipping container parked on the pavement. and it's got all these measurements inside it. And so I have to say my favorite one is the one that you just mentioned, which was like a little, there were these old school record turnstiles that used to be able to drop a record down. Like there was a little, you could stack them up and sort of drop them down. And there was a little thing that dropped filters.

14:04So, you know, it sucks air through the filter and then it was automated. So every 12 hours it, it would sort of change the filter, but it changed it like one of those old school LP players, which I, I loved, but just talk to us about how hard it is. Because, I mean, people think, you know, pollution is tiny. Why do you need a great big thing the size of a shipping container almost to measure air pollution? Like how hard is it to know, to find things out about air pollution? Yeah, it's actually the size of two shipping containers. It's amazing how many people we meet there and say it's opposite Madame Tussauds.

14:37That's the best way to describe it. And you see people wandering up and down the pavement, just almost unable to spot it. So it is pretty big. It's so big because there's so much equipment in it, not just equipment to measure air pollution. But, you know, we look at the traffic, we measure properties of the atmosphere as well that help us understand how the air pollution is moving around. It is hard to measure because the amounts of the, say, the contaminant that we have are actually quite small. We're talking about micrograms per cubic metre in terms of, you know, the mass concentration of particles.

15:19So that's quite difficult. Some of the particles that we try to measure as well are quite sneaky as well. And they partition between particle and vapour. So there are times when you can suck them into your machine. And because your machine tends to be a bit warmer than the outside world, the material that you've sampled can just volatilise away and you can lose it. So it evaporates, basically. Yeah, I suppose it more sublimes rather than evaporates, you know, it sublimates. But yeah, it can go from being particles into being a gas and you can lose it. And it's really tricky to be able to measure these things well.

16:06So, all right. So there's these specific sites. There's this air quality network across London, which is measuring perhaps in less. There isn't a shipping container on every corner. There are some smaller devices in lots of places. Let's come at this from the policies that have made a difference. So we mentioned U-Lez before, which is the thing that gets all the press and generates a lot of opinions. So could you, so just remind us all what the rules, like how the process of, what the rules were as, as, cause there's a, there's a low, so L-E-Z is a low emission zone and U-Lez is ultra low emission zone.

16:44and so just tell us a little bit about what the rules are for the people who don't live in London and then you've been measuring what difference have they made yeah maybe we should step back a little bit further and think about what these things are doing in principle so what they're trying to do is to deter or ban and they take different forms in different cities older and the most older and more polluting vehicles from an area and favour newer and less polluting vehicles. So they're almost like a time machine. So they're turning over the vehicle fleet faster than it would turn over anyway. So you have a newer vehicle fleet that is hopefully less polluting.

17:31So if you've been in London and seen the politics around ULES and the mayoral election, you would think it was a new idea and you would think that London was the only place that it's been tried but there's over 300 of these operating throughout Europe not many in the UK we're actually a bit behind the curve on these they've been going now for around 20 years I mean the first ones were in Sweden there was some zones tried in tunnels under the Alps where they just banned the really oldest and most polluting vehicles from using those tunnels. In London, the first zone was rolled out in 2008, and that only applied to big vehicles.

18:17So it applied to things that you probably have to have a special license to drive. Yeah. So lorries, buses, really big sort of coaches, things like that. And what that did was that did the same. It banned the, well, it made a charge if you bought an older, more polluting vehicle in. Then it's moved forward that that's tightened over time. The U-Lez came in and for the first time it expanded this from heavy vehicles into affecting cars. It had already done taxes before. And so that kind of hit the headlines a lot more because it wasn't just the people that were operating these large vehicle fleets or companies that own delivery vehicles that were having to make changes.

19:05It was actually affecting individual drivers as they came into the city centre. So and then so when was the last ULES change made? when was the most because it's been it's sort of tightened up over the years right and the area that it applies to has expanded so now I think there's two zones there's a sort of inner zone and an outer zone is that right uh not really it's just one zone that covers the whole of London uh now I might be mixing it up with the congestion charge yeah the congestion charge only covers the central area. So when the ULES, so since 2008, we'd had schemes that restricted, if you like, the older heavy polluting vehicles.

19:50And then the ULES, well, originally it's predecessor, the T-Charge, but the ULES came along in 2019. And that applied to the rest of the vehicle fleet as well, including things like motorbikes, cars, and so forth. So originally when the ULES was brought in, it applied to just central London. And then progressively, it's been moved out in stages so that from 2024, it covered the whole of London. So that makes it a far more simple structure. Okay, so the policy has gone in, there's a huge amount of debate about what people think about the direct, you know, the car drivers care about how it impacts them.

20:36But obviously, what it's harder for us to actually see is how it's impacted the pollution itself. So what's the evidence? What does the science say about the difference that ULES has made in London? Yeah, yeah. Well, I've been measuring air pollution in London for 30 years, and I really struggle to think of something else that caused a bigger and faster change than the central London ULES. It was really dramatic. As I said, we had many years through the 20-teens, if I can describe them as that where air pollution in London really wasn't going anywhere and in some cases the air pollution from traffic was actually getting worse in a few places and we used to have this sort of quality check with our instruments when we looked at the data at the end of the year and we decided you know is other any faults with the instrument can we trust it so we have various algorithms and one of them was how similar was this year compared to the year before because air pollution was pretty static it wasn't making any progress so we were getting loads of alarms coming from our instrument from the our data systems that were saying this is just too low something's changed uh you know has the instrument go wrong gone wrong go out and check it when actual fact it was just the changes that were being brought about by ULIS so ULIS was brought in just before uh COVID so it ran for the central London ran one for around for about a year before COVID came along and changed the whole world.

22:05And in that time, the nitrogen dioxide, and we can talk about why it was good for one pollutant and not for others. But anyway, nitrogen dioxide from traffic in central London reduced by I think it's about 39%. And I honestly can't think of something else that produced such a dramatic change. I mean, in the middle of the 20 teens, we had limit values that we had to meet by 2010. And there were places in London that weren't even close. And they were around two to three times the legal limit. And now we're in a position where, give or take a few digits, London is actually meeting those limits. And that's come in through the progressive rollout of the ULES.

22:51So that's nitrogen dioxide. How about things like particulates and the various different sizes of particles? How was all of that affected? From the current rollout of ULES, it's had little impact in that. But what we're seeing, it's part of a picture that's driving these concentrations downwards. I think it's worth thinking about how these schemes work in order to understand that. So when the first low emission zone was rolled out in 2008, it had a dramatic change on particle pollution on PM2.5, not on NO2. The U-Lays, when it rolled out, was the other way around. It made dramatic improvements to NO2, but not really so much change in the particle pollution.

23:36So just to clarify things, one of these is we're talking about NO2 is the nitrogen dioxide, which is a gas. And the other ones are the particles. So one of these policies affected the particles, but not the gas. And the other one affected the gas, but not the particles. Yep, exactly right. And you've got to think, why is this? And all of these schemes are very specific to the location they're setting out and also to the changes in technology and our fleet. So it's the differential between the dirty vehicles that you exclude and the newer, cleaner ones you bring in. At the time that the first zone that came out was implemented in 2008, there were some real exciting technologies coming into diesel vehicles to clean up their particles.

24:23So there was a big difference between the particle exhaust in the new vehicles versus the old ones. We had things like diesel particle filters, if you come across there, were just being introduced really and rolled out into heavy vehicles. So that was the dramatic change that happened. And it's interesting where that happened to a large degree. When we looked to try and assess the change, we found actually little change in central London, but we found quite a big change in outer London from the first zone. The reason being that most of the vehicles that were already running in central London had been upgraded before the scheme.

25:03So a lot of the buses have been upgraded. then when we wind forward to the recent you les um you'll all know and everyone that listens to this podcast will remember dieselgate and the you know the the huge problems and legal issues that's scandal it was a scandal okay it was it was uh that surrounded vw and then has gone on to people have gone on critically to look at other vehicle manufacturers as well. And that involves nitrogen dioxide. And the bottom line there was the vehicles, when they're driven on the road, produced a lot more nitrogen oxide, such a whole family of pollutants, on the road than they did in the laboratory tests when they were approved.

25:56But that is where there's been a lot of improvements. Things like Euro 6 and the different iterations of that come along have really brought that down. So now we're in a position where if you implement a low emission zone, the delta, if you like, between the clean vehicles and the dirty ones, the big change is that in nitrogen dioxide. So that's why the current ULES was really effective for nitrogen dioxide because it was excluding vehicles that emitted a lot of it. but was less effective for particles because particle filters were already pretty standard. But there's an interesting thing with particles, which I'm sure I've interviewed people about before.

26:37It might have been you. I don't remember. Which is that the sources, you know, we think of particulate pollution because of soots and chimneys and things like that. We think of it as something that comes out of chimneys and exhaust pipes. But actually, that is not the only source of particulate pollution. And I think I remember there are studies suggesting that the particles from tyres, so tyre wear and brake wear and all those tiny things that kind of get rubbed off as cars accelerate and decelerate, that that pollution is sort of becoming as significant as what comes out of the tailpipe. Is that right?

27:11Yeah, it's even more than you describe. So these wear processes, I like your analogy of things that get rubbed off, but these wear processes, so brake wear, tyre wear and road wear as well is really important, now produce more particles than the exhausts of the vehicles. So if you think about a vehicle driving around, its main source of particle pollution is coming from these wear processes and not from the exhaust part. I always think that's one of these things that um it gets so there's so much about how we think about the world in that because because when I think it's the same with the word efficiency actually but we sort of talk about things wearing out but we never ask where all the bits went you know it's just assumed that things wear out that they somehow get thinner in the case of tires or you know they get holes in the bits but nobody ever says where did those bits go and of course they have to go somewhere that's not you know we we have conservation of mass in the world they They don't just vanish.

28:11So they disappear into the environment. But I think, you know, the worrying thing about the tire particulates, I guess, is that they get, it's not just that they fall off and sit on the road. It's that as a car swooshes past, they get lifted up again into the air. There's this kind of resuspension thing, right? Where if you have, you know, the busy traffic or wind then lifts them up and then they're once again at a height that we can breathe in. So do you know what people are doing about pollution standards for tyre wear? I guess because that's really hard to measure, isn't it? Yeah, we're kind of, we're into new territory.

28:46I think if you stand back, almost the whole history of the way in which we've managed air pollution is very much a whack-a-mole approach. So we've just focused on one pollutant. It's captured the public's attention. It's captured the attention of politicians as well. And action has been taken. So if you go back, you know, Clean Air Act 70 odd years ago, what it focused on was smoke and not sulfur. And by focusing on smoke and ignoring sulfur, we brought about the problems from acid rain over Scandinavia and northern Europe from our coal and oil burning. That was really, you know, really damaging for the ecosystems in those areas of the 70s, 80s, 90s.

29:31It hasn't entirely gone away. So then we focused on industrial air pollution. And if you look at these times, you can see papers written by people saying, oh, look, traffic is a real problem. But it was completely ignored. Then we move on to traffic and exhaust pipes. And although people have been talking about tyre wear, brake wear, wood burning, ammonia from agriculture for a long time, still the focus of policy is focused on the exhaust pipes of vehicles. I often say I think we're trying to manage the air pollution problems we have today in the 21st century using the science that we had in the 20th.