Clean Air Stickers for France

[Zak33]

Lo people

If you drive in France you might need one of these in your car

http://www.rac.co.uk/drive/news/moto...french-cities/

France has introduced 'clean air' windscreen stickers, as a legal requirement in some of its major cities, to identify a vehicle’s emissions levels.

British drivers heading to the France capital are advised by the RAC that driving without a France 'clean air' sticker, called a Crit'Air vignette – which costs as little as £3.20 – makes them culpable for an on-the-spot fine of up to £117.

Drivers of non-French-registered vehicles though, have been offered a degree of leniency – given until March 31 to fully comply with the Crit’Air initiative. An English language section of the government website responsible for stickers launched on February 1.

[directhex]

I guess this is for heavily polluted cities like Paris - rather than relying on drivers to know the fine detail of whether they should be driving there or not, they can just say "high pollution - access only for 3 and below" or similar on bad days, to keep diesels away

[kompukare]

Yes, but isn't something like this easy to cheat at?

We already know that emission standards have almost no bearings on reality, that aggressive acceleration can throw up fifty times (I think that what it was) the measured normal emission, and that the car junkies with their supped-up 'tuned' cars not only cause lots of noise pollution but also way more emission.

As long as people insist on driving everywhere and especially into every city* nothing major will change until cleaner (EV or similar) vehicles are mainstream. Of course, EV's do nothing about car traffic basically bullying pedestrians in most cities, but maybe robotic cars will do that eventually.

*Rural dwellers often say they cannot live without a car because public transport in the country is so bad and hence they need a car. Which is mostly true and fair enough (they not really a large % of the population so wouldn't make that big a difference to overall pollution levels anyhow), but what I object to is rural drivers then expecting to be able to drive their cars into city centres. A lot of small towns seem to have crazy amounts of drivers going through their centres. Of course, local businesses don't want to see their centres pedestrians as they count on those country customers who don't want to walk anywhere.

[Ttaskmaster]

what I object to is rural drivers then expecting to be able to drive their cars into city centres.

Then stop charging me INSANE amounts of money for offensively poor public transport, then!!
£10 to park (if you can even find a space) outside the town limits plus £3.75 each way on a bus that only comes once an hour and doesn't stop anywhere near where I'm going (seriously, getting to work would take 2 busses and almost 2 hours), is likely packed with screaming kids, abusive Yoof and people who sound so sick they'd not be allowed in a hospital... Oh, and drivers only accept exact change. No card payments. My car takes 10 minutes, costs less than £1 each way and I have parking space.

It's almost quicker to park up somewhere discreet and walk in... which is what I often did when I lived and worked in town and had no transport of my own.

I live in the countryside because I can no longer afford to live in town. I get no gas, sewerage or internet. I have no public transport. Taxis to town cost £20 (£40 during peak hours). I don't even have pavements to walk along and the traffic mostly does 60-80mph on our 40-limit roads, so bicycles are out unless I fancy a trip to hospital every few months.
I have a knackered old diesel car because it was so cheap to buy and is cheaper to run than even my motorcycle.

So until things improve, I'm damn well driving into town... not that it'd make any difference to this dump even if I deleted my EGR, DPF and ran straight-thru exhausts!!

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Then stop charging me INSANE amounts of money for offensively poor public transport, then!!
£10 to park (if you can even find a space) outside the town limits plus £3.75 each way on a bus that only comes once an hour and doesn't stop anywhere near where I'm going (seriously, getting to work would take 2 busses and almost 2 hours), is likely packed with screaming kids, abusive Yoof and people who sound so sick they'd not be allowed in a hospital... Oh, and drivers only accept exact change. No card payments. My car takes 10 minutes, costs less than £1 each way and I have parking space.

It's almost quicker to park up somewhere discreet and walk in... which is what I often did when I lived and worked in town and had no transport of my own.

I live in the countryside because I can no longer afford to live in town. I get no gas, sewerage or internet. I have no public transport. Taxis to town cost £20 (£40 during peak hours). I don't even have pavements to walk along and the traffic mostly does 60-80mph on our 40-limit roads, so bicycles are out unless I fancy a trip to hospital every few months.
I have a knackered old diesel car because it was so cheap to buy and is cheaper to run than even my motorcycle.

So until things improve, I'm damn well driving into town... not that it'd make any difference to this dump even if I deleted my EGR, DPF and ran straight-thru exhausts!!

It costs me £5 just for a 3 to 3.5 mile round journey into town on the bus,or nearly £7 on the bus to go to the nearest cinema,and I live in a built up area in a major county. Public transport is a ripoff in this country. In the end I just walk even with shopping. Even the train tends to be cheaper and more convenient to go places which are a bit further.

[kompukare]

Well, Reading should be big enough to have a decent park & ride. And yes, it would need to be subsided. But it also needs both carrot and stick as in making it impossible for someone to drive into the centre and park there for less than using the park & ride.

For smaller towns, it just needs some decent planing. Pedestrianise the centre and make people park away from there. And if that means multi-storey parking, make sure they cars going into that are underground or that pedestrians have decent zebra crossings etc. No point in having a nice pedestrianised centre but a hazard course to walk or cycle into it.

Basically, planners have prioritised cars since at least the 1960s when the actual priority in terms of thinking and road space should be:
1) pedestrians
2) cyclists
3) public vehicles
4) private vehicles
Especially in towns there should never be a case where pavements get less than 1 metre while cars get two lanes each way. Good planning would be a minimum of 2m for pavements, 1m for cycling and whatever is left for cars. If that means converting some roads to one-way so be it.

[kompukare]

It costs me £5 just for a 3 to 3.5 mile round journey into town on the bus,or nearly £7 on the bus to go to the nearest cinema,and I live in a built up area in a major county. Public transport is a ripoff in this country. In the end I just walk even with shopping. Even the train tends to be cheaper and more convenient to go places which are a bit further.

One of the worst things in the UK (aside from London) is that the bus and the train is owned by different companies. All tickets should be zonal so that you can use the bus to get the train station and the bus at the end to get to your destination.

I was commuting about 30 miles in a previous job and the train costs £210pm. Looked up what a 50km commute would costs on the continent. Think only the Netherlands was close in terms of costs with Sweden and Germany way below that (about €50 AFAIR). But in the UK I got a train ticket and that was it. In Germany the ticket would have been zonal allowing the use of train, trams and buses. Plus at the weekend you can take family members with you on that ticket. Oh, and it was transferable (never understood the greed of the TOCs having non-transferable tickets as it's not like two people can use them at once).

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

One of the worst things in the UK (aside from London) is that the bus and the train is owned by different companies. All tickets should be zonal so that you can use the bus to get the train station and the bus at the end to get to your destination.

I was commuting about 30 miles in a previous job and the train costs £210pm. Looked up what a 50km commute would costs on the continent. Think only the Netherlands was close in terms of costs with Sweden and Germany way below that (about €50 AFAIR). But in the UK I got a train ticket and that was it. In Germany the ticket would have been zonal allowing the use of train, trams and buses. Plus at the weekend you can take family members with you on that ticket. Oh, and it was transferable (never understood the greed of the TOCs having non-transferable tickets as it's not like two people can use them at once).

The trains are barely better - to get a 15 mile round ticket(30 miles in total) for my last job was like £120 and that was not at peak hours,and at peak hours a weekly or monthly ticket would have been silly money. If I was still there and commuted from where I live now,it would be a few hundred quid a month,and it would be heading away from London,not heading into London.

The thing is I used to get a lift into work from a friend who used to work there,and in-between the miles of walking I had to do to the stations and the delays,it could easily be a two to three hour commute a day if the trains were on time. In a car it would take only an hour in total both ways,ie around 25 to 30 minutes for each journey.

The train journey would technically have been only 20 to 25 minutes,but I remember due to delays sometimes if I was working evenings we could be stuck at the station for a blasted hour,and the buses stopped working in the evenings too.

Then we had a rail derailment,so I had to try a different route into work, for a week it took like nearly 4 hours just to get to work and back everyday.

Plus the idiot train company decided to cut back on bus replacement services and instead of them leaving at fixed times,said they would only leave when they were full.

So at that point unless I wanted to get fired I had to endure a ridiculous train journey and it was compounded by the fact we had a project to finish so we were working long hours too.

The whole concept of public services in this country is warped - loads of other countries seem to make it work. Instead of moaning about Europe I wish more of our idiot politicians looked at how they seem to be able to do things better than this country can.

They are more worried about helping their mates out then serving the public interest.

It would not surprise me one bit if a lot of people don't work since transport is so expensive it makes their lowish paying job on a zero hour contract not viable.

[TheAnimus]

I often think that people outside of London don't get what public transport must be like. They don't vote for paying that much tax and charges.

Even in London we get greedy idiots voting for fair freezes and the like.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

London public transport is fantastic compared to elsewhere where I have lived in the UK(and I have lived in London) and the only places which can get close tend to be university towns/cities. If not its horrible and rubbish. Plus we get price increases whenever they feel like it and then on top of that they end up cutting the number of buses per hour(or trains per hour) so you end up waiting longer. Seriously paying £5 just to get go around 3 miles in a round trip,its daylight robbery and paying nearly £7 to go to the nearest cinema who then charges nearly London prices to watch a film.

To put it in context it would cost me only slightly more to travel to London,watch a film there and then have a nice walk around.

Sadly in the context of that you might as well use a car - I would say cycle,but the lack of cycle lanes means you pretty much would be a brave person to want to do that for anything other than short distances.

Edit!!

This is how expensive "public" transport is here.

I had some friends who came down on the train to visit us - it would have cost almost the SAME getting a taxi both ways as using the bus.

[ik9000]

And with an election looming remember people, it was the tories who privatised the rail network. It was the tories (Macmillan) who axed the branch lines under Marples via Beeching (who IIRC were somewhat linked to road-haulage companies) and then didn't replace it with the proposed bus routes. It is the same tories who in the 80s/90s axed the committees responsible for planning power generation when the industry was privatised (and creating the looming brown-out crises that no-one is talking about under the smoke screen of brexit). And the current Tories approved the shambolic contracts award to Govia to "run" Southern Rail, and then won't intervene when they are ruining people's livelihoods. They are also now stripping the funding to schools and hospitals and you wonder what will happen to those in a few years? If that wrangles and you don't like it, vote sensibly and accordingly.

This country needs an alternative that isn't comrade Mumble-beard. And it needs one quickly IMO. If you know of one let me know!

edit: just for balance, it was labour who then enacted most of beeching's cut-backs despite having campaigned as opposing them. So it seems some things never change... and it was the labour government who opted not to build the nuclear power stations proposed in the Major years - so they are just as equally to blame for the looming power crisis.

[Ttaskmaster]

Well, Reading should be big enough to have a decent park & ride.

It has three, I believe... and yet it STILL sucks!!

But it also needs both carrot and stick as in making it impossible for someone to drive into the centre and park there for less than using the park & ride.

I park at work because we have spaces on site, or take the motorcycle in because it can fit places.
Thing is, though, even if it were free people would still drive in and pay the extortionate rates to park, because it's convenient, faster, vastly more reliable and does not expose you to the unpleasantness that is other people in an enclosed space.
Seriously, I can't remember the last time I was on a Reading bus and there wasn't at least one person hacking their lungs out over everyone. There are no appropriate words I can use in description of the experience, without getting banhammered.

Pedestrianise the centre and make people park away from there. And if that means multi-storey parking, make sure they cars going into that are underground or that pedestrians have decent zebra crossings etc.

Again, Reading is pretty good for that, too. Several multistoreys, to the point where so many people use them they're typically full.

What would help more is if people had smaller cars.
Most of those who drive massive Mercs and Beemers really don't need them.

I often think that people outside of London don't get what public transport must be like.

No, we know exactly what it is like and what it should be, both inside and outside. Most of us have been to London at some point. Some of us have even lived in Camden, Harrow, Burnt Oak (Colindale if you prefer being posh) and St Johns Wood.
It works relatively well in London, but that kind of asset investment won't be available outside.

And with an election looming remember people, it was the tories who privatised the rail network. It was the tories (Macmillan) who axed the branch lines under Marples via Beeching (who IIRC were somewhat linked to road-haulage companies) and then didn't replace it with the proposed bus routes. It is the same tories who in the 80s/90s axed the committees responsible for planning power generation when the industry was privatised (and creating the looming brown-out crises that no-one is talking about under the smoke screen of brexit). And the current Tories approved the shambolic contracts award to Govia to "run" Southern Rail, and then won't intervene when they are ruining people's livelihoods. They are also now stripping the funding to schools and hospitals and you wonder what will happen to those in a few years?

As they say - It wasn't the EU who did all this.... but the Brexiteers have just handed complete, unregulated control of this kingdom to those who did.

Yes, yes, yes, it was the Tories, it was the Tories, the Tories did all this.... them and Labour.... dumped on by Tories and shovelled up by Labour... blah blah blah blah blah.....
Who were the idiots that voted them in?
Who are the idiots who let them get away with it?

[Zak33]

I.....


err.....
I ... uhhm.....



/cough

/blush


I wanted to make...er...sure that anyone going to ...er....Paris for example...


er....

knew they needed a little £3 sticker thingyumy





I didn't expect WORLD WAR III about Buses

[g8ina]

can open, worms everywhere

[Butcher]

Useful post Zak, I might be doing a run through France soon so good to know I'll need my little purple sticker.