TODAY, we bring news of another Town Hall wheeze to make the streets of Oxford less polluted.
For years, the city and county councils have argued about how best to reduce growing levels of nitrogen dioxide in the air we all breathe.
And on Wednesday, they will declare that from 2013 – yes, that’s in four years’ time – only the most polluting buses will be banned from the city’s streets.
No mention about dirty lorries, vans or cars — just buses.
The fact this announcement is being made on April Fool’s Day is probably lost on those that dreamed up the scheme.
Oxfordshire County Council and their colleagues at the city council are damned good at coming up with plenty of initiatives — some of which never see the light of day and others, like this one, that will have no impact until years to come.
We have to clean up the air in Oxford, that much is true, and buses have to shoulder a large share of the blame.
But the creation of a so-called Low Emission Zone (LEZ) is so wishy-washy that we struggle to see the benefits.
If anything, it discriminates solely against bus companies while the rest of polluting traffic is let off scot-free.
If only we could have eliminated the hot air involved in creating this LEZ, we would have slashed the city’s carbon emissions at a stroke.
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