Boris goes to war on Diesel

[XJSJohn]

Otispunkmeyer said:

XJSJohn said:

They seriously got teh air polution down here in Bangkok a few year ago by converting all the diesels to CNG, cheap to do and the various companies didnt have to spend a fortune converting their fleet.

yes still polutes but much less smog / choke from visable large particles.

Depends how they do that because the potential is there for huge NOx and HC emissons ... Basically methane slip. And for those who bang on about co2, methane is even worse. Does sort out the PM though!

Portable emissions tests are also now revealing that things like NOx emission basically haven't dropped for 15+ years!

Edited by Otispunkmeyer on Wednesday 30th July 23:14

Situation here (and Jakarta, KL etc) was not so much worrying about the overall planet and its CO2 / greenhouse gas emissions but the levels of large particulates and smoke emissions from old engines stuck in heavy traffic all day. The levels of respiritory illness has droped significantly in teh past decade yet many of the same vehicles are still on the road, and congestion has gone up! Even moderately healthy people ncan tell a major improvement. So its a local fix for a local problem, which i imagine is London's problem.

(using Gas also doesnt hurt the oil dependancy situation either as SE Asia has large reserves of the stuff but not much black smelly!

[Otispunkmeyer]

ChemicalChaos said:

Standing next to a nitromethane burning car in a confined space. The gas certainly seemed to acidify on contact with everyone's eyes and throats!

That's why top fuel boys have a row of gas masks hanging in the garage area!!

XJSJohn I design dual fuel diesel engine systems as my current job. Substituting diesel with LNG/CNG. Cheaper and cleaner but we also have to try meet methane and NOx emissions as well!

Edited by Otispunkmeyer on Thursday 31st July 08:18

[XJSJohn]

Otispunkmeyer said:

XJSJohn I design dual fuel diesel engine systems as my current job. Substituting diesel with LNG/CNG. Cheaper and cleaner but we also have to try meet methane and NOx emissions as well!

Edited by Otispunkmeyer on Thursday 31st July 08:18

yea in the UK you do ....

out here its still cowboys and indians!!!

[oyster]

turbobloke said:

oyster said:

turbobloke said:

As to Boris and London, any city than bans or restricts cars and relies on buses and diesel taxis will be catapulting itself to a position at or near the top of the urban air pollution league tables, just ask Oxford.

Agree with all the rest of your comments but the above makes no sense at all. How do you work that out?

That's exactly what happened to Oxford as a matter of record, it banned cars from the city centre, busising the city, which then headed straight to the top spot in pollution league tables. Would that help to make any sense of it?! The reasons aren't difficult to work out

A few years after the Oxford Transport Strategy was implemented, banning cars and encouraging buses to proliferate, this league table appeared in The Guardian.

Top 10 polluted places

1 Oxford

2 Bath

3 Glasgow

4 London, Marylebone Road

5 London, King's Road

6 Exeter

7 London, Hammersmith Broadway

8 Bristol

9 Sheffield

10 London, Brent

If diesel buses and taxis were that much of a problem I'd expect Oxford St to be in that list. For most of the day it is at a standstill with dozens of back to back buses emitting all that diesel by-product into the local air.

Anyway, interesting that it's the Guardian you quoted... I wonder if they realise their error?!

[Highway Star]

That list is from 2004 IIRC. TB was only using it to illustrate his point on Oxford's move to ban cars from the city centre.

[alangla]

Highway Star said:

That list is from 2004 IIRC. TB was only using it to illustrate his point on Oxford's move to ban cars from the city centre.

Also bear in mind that in Oxford St, a significant proportion of the buses today will be hybrids & pushing out very little when they're in traffic. Glasgow only being 3rd is interesting, assuming the location being referred to is Hope St at Central Station (it usually is) - this is an uphill main bus route with a taxi stand (basically a queuing system for the taxi rank round the corner) right next to the pollution monitoring cabin and traditionally always came top of the "most polluted street" league. The tall buildings either side don't help much in dispersing the pollution here either. Bus emissions at this location are definitely a lot less unpleasant than they were 10 years ago though - most of the buses now are 2000 or later Euro emissions compliant rather than the smoke belching 1980s (probably designed in the 70s) crap that ran about 10 years ago. It would be interesting to see a straight comparison of pollution at this spot each year for the last 10 - I reckon CO2 might well be up, but the nasties, especially particulates will be well down.

(Assuming I'm thinking of the right place, here's the pollution monitoring cabin - http://goo.gl/maps/zfceu - the taxi queue will often be back to here & this road is generally jammed with buses. I think the Streetview pic was taken on a Sunday morning)

[turbobloke]

alangla said:

Highway Star said:

That list is from 2004 IIRC. TB was only using it to illustrate his point on Oxford's move to ban cars from the city centre.

Also bear in mind that in Oxford St, a significant proportion of the buses today will be hybrids & pushing out very little when they're in traffic. Glasgow only being 3rd is interesting, assuming the location being referred to is Hope St at Central Station (it usually is) - this is an uphill main bus route with a taxi stand (basically a queuing system for the taxi rank round the corner) right next to the pollution monitoring cabin and traditionally always came top of the "most polluted street" league. The tall buildings either side don't help much in dispersing the pollution here either. Bus emissions at this location are definitely a lot less unpleasant than they were 10 years ago though - most of the buses now are 2000 or later Euro emissions compliant rather than the smoke belching 1980s (probably designed in the 70s) crap that ran about 10 years ago. It would be interesting to see a straight comparison of pollution at this spot each year for the last 10 - I reckon CO2 might well be up, but the nasties, especially particulates will be well down.

(Assuming I'm thinking of the right place, here's the pollution monitoring cabin - http://goo.gl/maps/zfceu - the taxi queue will often be back to here & this road is generally jammed with buses. I think the Streetview pic was taken on a Sunday morning)

Highway Star is correct about the timing and its relation to Oxford implementing the OTS.

As mentioned earlier, Glasgow made it to top spot in the polluted UK city league tables in 2012.

http://www.scotsman.com/news/environment/no-clean-...

There's a claim in that article regarding London and how the Congestion Charge impacted on pollution levels - here's another view, from 2008.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13809-london...

Vehicle emissions technology has been improving air quality for some time, the Con Charge may well not have had the effect claimed in the Glasgow story, as per the New Scientist report.

[MaximumJed]

Regarding Oxford Street in particular: http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/oxford...

One of the most polluted places in the world (for NO2 at least)

[heebeegeetee]

turbobloke said:

Possibly, and if so they ought to be specific and identify 3-NBA and 1,8-DNP as the two most carcingenic chemicals known to science -

Has anything new been published about this this century?

[Art0ir]

Mr GrimNasty said:

If we had mass use of hybrid/electric cars, we'd have an even worse ozone problem.

Can you expand upon that please?

[Otispunkmeyer]

XJSJohn said:

Otispunkmeyer said:

XJSJohn I design dual fuel diesel engine systems as my current job. Substituting diesel with LNG/CNG. Cheaper and cleaner but we also have to try meet methane and NOx emissions as well!

Edited by Otispunkmeyer on Thursday 31st July 08:18

yea in the UK you do ....

out here its still cowboys and indians!!!

I was once told that one of the major selling points of a JCB in India was how many people you could sit in the bucket and on the arches when its not being used as an excavator!

[anonymous-user]

Hey guys, look on the bright side!! It's another reason to not go to London..........

[vit4]

I was very surprised at how clean the air felt when I went to NYC last year. I can only imagine it was in no small part due to the tiny number of diesels compared to here in London

[Foppo]

Boris goes to war on what? He will have to work hard for his money to clean London up.Fourth polluted city in Europe.

[Russ T Bolt]

voyds9 said:

Wonder if he will notice/care that buses and taxis run on diesel.

I caught a bus this morning in London that didn't run on diesel.

[heebeegeetee]

I mean in fairness, if we do get electric taxis or whatever, it'll be the first time in the history of the UK that we will have had taxis based on up-to-date vehicles, instead of the normal tired, shagged, polluting wrecks that have always formed the taxi parc.

They'll still be dreadfully driven though.

[bodhi]

Highway Star said:

That list is from 2004 IIRC. TB was only using it to illustrate his point on Oxford's move to ban cars from the city centre.

That makes sense actually, as the list was done before they banned cars from Princes Street in Edinburgh. I walked up there last year smoking a cigarette, the smoke I was breathing in actually felt cleaner than what I was breathing in between drags. Absolutely disgusting, and made a bit of a folly of Edinburgh City Council doing it for the polar bears.

[cwis]

Art0ir said:

Mr GrimNasty said:

If we had mass use of hybrid/electric cars, we'd have an even worse ozone problem.

Can you expand upon that please?

I was wondering about that too.

With old style DC motors you could get sparks from the commutator (if not supressed) which could spit out a fair bit of ozone, but they are stone age compared to the ones you get in electric cars - I thought they were all AC with phase switching and clever stuff to conserve power, increase torque and lower consumption.

But I'm quite ready to learn my assumptions are wrong or there is another source of ozone!