Vocal Voices

So say some doctors and its Mayor.

Why?

It is because nearly 40% of all nitrogen oxide emissions and PM10 pollution in London come from diesel vehicles and, it is claimed, 9,400 Londoners a year die prematurely from the fumes.

Hang on, though, London isn't the worst place for pollution. It comes behind Glasgow, Leeds, Salford, Scunthorpe and Eastbourne in the UK. One also asks what is being done about the other 60% of emissions and their creators.

We get the propaganda - diesels are bad - what we do not get is why towns and cities are taking steps to make pollution worse by forcing vehicles to travel inefficiently. It is estimated that nationwide over 40,000 of us die from pollution caused by vehicles, most of them in cities.

what we do not get is why towns and cities are taking steps to make pollution worse by forcing vehicles to travel inefficiently

.... and Birmingham and the West Midlands has just been cited as having the worst work commute in England, 38% I think it was taking over 2 hours. Part of the blame was inefficient public transport provision, a real Catch 22. Late running buses = more people commuting by car = even later-running buses and virtual gridlock in places.

Diesel buses idling away in never-ending traffic jams - says it all, really.

Gagh, knee jerk no thought, usual vacillating behaviour. It is not for nothing that I keep saying we need to innovate our way out of this.

I've noticed that the newer London busses kill their engine almost immediately when they stop. The new Routemasters are a diesel electric hybrid which only runs the diesel to keep the batteries up to a certain charge level. It's quite nice to have your bus coast off without the engine only to kick in when needed. Of course it kicks in immediately if you are powering away on open road. But in the very worst traffic, creeping and crawling, it's mainly battery and that is the kind of traffic which increases emissions.

Of course the goal would be to take the hybrids and move them to LPG, which would be better, but the reality is that for LPG (which has less energy than diesel), you need a more powerful engine, or more LPG, to run the lower powered on which comes to the same thing. Stopping Diesel saves thousands of lives now. Using LPG instead kills hundreds of millions in 2100. Interesting choice.

Instead of yelling for banning diesel right now, which would be ludicrous as you'd have no busses, no fire brigade, no police and no food or other goods delivered into the city, how about using the noggin.

No Congestion charge for plug in hybrids.
Full change over to plug in hybrids, using diesel, by 2021
All plug in hybrids transitioned from diesel to either LPG or petrol by 2026

Now that is a target we can hit. It will also cause a huge investment in vehicles. Essentially it will mean that anyone or any business that need to bring a diesel powered vehicle into London will have to replace their vehicle or re-engine it.

Once it has gone into action, implement it in all the other cities. Granted the "bonus" of skipping congestion charge won't fly for other cities, but the timings can be pretty much the same. Perhaps with incentives in parking costs etc...

Bans without and option are useless. People have no choice but to avoid the ban in the best way they can. A ban with a path to get out of it drives change.

Always better to think before you shout before you ban.

Maybe politicians and pressure groups could learn this?

Or not.

The dash to diesel of about 15 years since shouldn't have happened. It was actually encouraged by the government of the day by the way emissions are measured. Yes, diesels are cleaner if you measure one set of pollutants, but dirtier if you measure a different set!
Talk about the law of unintended consequences..
To make diesels clean they have had to fit them with diesel particulate filters, gas recirculation valves, have had to fit them with dual mass flywheels; there is a lot to go wrong on a diesel car nowadays. I don't think I'd fancy a five or six year old one.

Plus as suff says, ban diesels from city centres and you are banning delivery trucks. That should be interesting.

I can't see a ban. What I can see id diesels being charged double to entered city centre clean air zones.

Cromwell wrote:I can't see a ban.

Nor me. What I can see is the transition to all diesel cars having to have Diesel Oxidation Catalysts (DOC) and Diesel Particulate Filters (DPF) regardless of age. The increasing cost and reduced performance, combined with the improvements to petrol engines, will lead to the natural death of the diesel car.

When it comes to large DERVs, however, there is still little to compete with a diesel, especially for long haul. The new diesel hybrids will eventually take over, as will gas turbine hybrids. The GTs can run on quite few fuels including aviation turpentine, kerosene and diesel.

Will all this happen by 2020, as the doctors want? No! In the future? Only if politicians are taken out of the equation.

Yes it seems the electrification of vehicles has finally made its mark and there is a specialist truck manufacturer out there already to do this. Especially running on LNG the benefits are huge.

The whole problem with GT is that it needs to be in cruise in order to maintain efficiency. Stop start is simply a no go. GT/Electric is a match made in heaven for the manufacturers. Where Electric takes up the strain and the GT just does the charging at a constant rate until complete, then switches off. If you charge at, say, 25%, then the GT gets to do a long, constant, run at max efficiency. It is no wonder they are talking 200% – 300% fuel efficiency.

Pity nobody ever wanted to take me up on my idea, because it runs, roughly, on GT principles, does not have the stop start issue and can give up to 300% fuel efficiency for a truck without any major issue. They could have had it in the 1980’s….

Hey Ho… Nobody wants to change until they are forced to and then they go off on a tangent…

I worked on many different types of internal combustion engines (ICE) in my time in the RAF, from petrol and diesel to gas turbines of different marques.

GTs (Jets) are very fuel efficient and wonderful for steady cruising whether it be a plane, ship or lorry. They only have basically one moving part - the shaft. However, they are crap at stop/start, that is why the hybrid approach, with flywheel, is so essential for their use in haulage. Rather than venting the exhaust gases for power, as in an aero engine, these gases can be used to power a generator to charge the batteries for the electric motor unit used to power away from idle or low speeds.

Two blokes on a small message board know this, but somehow it has evaded the attention of our political policy makers. Go figure.

Easily 20 years ago, West Midlands trialled single-deckers powered by gas of some sort, big pods on the roof, but whether that was LNG or something else, I don't know. Only 10 of them, but they did last, only withdrawn around 2 or 3 years ago. Spent all their working lives at Walsall Garage, as far as I know, presumably because there must have been special fuelling arrangements.

West Midlands also trialled Electric Hybrid buses from about 3-4 years ago. They were primarily Government Grant funded and there were initially 20 of them, 10 based in Wolverhampton and the others in Birmingham itself. Having travelled on then, the "cutting-in" of the diesel engine from the electric at around 8-10 mph was very noticeable. Most locals complained they were unreliable as they "kept on conking out every time they stopped" ......

There was a second batch purchased bringing the fleet up to about 37 or 38, but I think the bottom line was that they were (a) a tad too expensive and (b) didn't provide enough cost-saving so no more were ordered.

Ossie, this is what happens when things are rushed in on the back of 'doing something'; they often fail to match up to the hype. On the other hand, when things are tested to the limit, as with the Routemasters in London and the new low-emission hybrids in Leeds, they can work out.

Too often things are done, in all sectors, based on hype over substance.

the Routemasters were roundly condemned instead of being viewed as what they really were. The first in a generation of new age busses which would lead us forward into a cleaner and healthier future.

I read about a decade ago that toy manufacturers sit on a precipice. One single toy could be the breaking of a company. It costs to much to get it designed and made in the volume needed that a single flop could literally sink the company.

We have become the worst of consumerism. We want everything right now and it has to work first time right now or we have to go back to what is known.

In that way we deserve the deaths Diesel causes. Because instead of championing the move to new technology and embracing the "warts and all" it requires, we deride it and demand older things which kill our old and vulnerable.