Forum topic: How the next Mayor can tackle London's environmental crisis

Tom's first comment facetious

His second comment is off-topic an irrelevant. This topic is about air quality and I haven't mention cycle lanes in it, nor has anyone else, until him,

There seems little point in ignoring recently published, thorough scientific work, to develop your own rule of thumb estimate based on stale 2010 data when for example NOX research was still six years away from publication at that time.


The world is changing based on emerging evidence, whether politicians and the motor / petrol industries will move at commensurate speed is less certain Other areas are certainly changing: Oslo (centre car free by 2019); Milan (planning to extend its congestion zone and traffic free areas into a “peoples first” city); Dublin (proposing to ban cars from 2017); Paris (already managing traffic free days at times of high pollution and phasing diesel out by 2020); Madrid (extending a limited car zone with the new city plan being “pedestrian first”). In the UK, Greater Manchester is now consulting on far reaching actions such as fines on organisations not developing modal shift travel plans for their workers and goods, and freight / commercial consolidation hubs to help rationalise delivery volumes.


But on air pollution there seems little better than Professor Jonathan Grigg of Queens University who with the background of 15 years research in the area comments, “if the water from the tap did the things we see down to (air) pollution we wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole”.


So, more active travel and if motorised transport is necessary, make sure it is as clean as possible. It’s the responsibility of all of us as the joint Royal Colleges so clearly make the case for.

No it wasn't facetious. You are vastly overestimating how many vehicles 'have' to be there. And no it wasn't off topic. This is what you said previously: "Oh, of course. Improving and building better roads, in particular increasing capacity at over saturated junctions. And not wasting money on ridiculous anti-car and bus user schemes like the so called mini-Hollands." Your argument is that the air pollution concern is not fully warranted and cycling infrastructure isn't the way of solving it.