There are many concerns about the practicality of electric vehicles. One major issue in London and other major UK cities will be how those people who park on the street will be able to charge them after all petrol/diesel car sales are banned in 2035, as the Government is proposing. The above photograph shows a typical outer London suburban street (Upwood Road in Lee, part of the proposed Healthy Neighbourhoods scheme in Lewisham). Cars are parked nose to tail during all of the day. Although some houses have off-street parking, the owners frequently have multiple vehicles some of which are parked on the road. In inner London there is typically no off-street parking at all with closely packed terraced houses

There are suggestions that charging points could be located in lampposts and be operated on a commercial basis, or by installing new charging points along the pavement border. Creating such infrastructure would be very expensive though.

Some local authorities such as the London Borough of Hounslow are suggesting that an alternative is to allow residents to trail a cable from their homes over the pavement (this writer has seen one example of this already). But that creates a trip hazard and is only practical if the car is able to be parked within a few feet of the home. As finding a parking space anywhere near can be exceedingly difficult on many roads, that does not seem likely to be a realistic proposition on most roads. Those people who live in blocks of flats would also have problems.

Even if a cable cover is used, or a channel dug in the pavement as has been trialled in Oxford, it still seems to have limited application with significant risks to the public and the cost might be £1,500 per cable for a channel according to a report in LTT.

The compulsory use of electric vehicles and banning of petrol/diesel ones has not been thought through.

Beech Street

The City of London Corporation is pushing ahead with the closure of Beech Street to all but electric vehicles from Mid-March. The Corporation is running some “Drop-in Events” nearby where you can get more information or ask questions on the 18th, 24th, 25th and 27th February.

CAZ Checking

Several major UK cities are now looking at implementing Clean Air Zones (CAZs) that will impose charges on non-compliant vehicles rather like the London ULEZ scheme. Birmingham and Leeds are two such cities which are reasonably well advanced with plans although the actual start dates have not been announced as yet.

The Government has set up a web site at https://www.gov.uk/check-clean-air-zone-charge where you will be able to check whether your vehicle is compliant but there is no central payment system and it seems auto-pay systems where you simply register your vehicle and a fee is charged to your credit card if you enter the zone will not be available as it is in London.

Basically it looks like this will be a very complicated bureaucratic nightmare to know whether you need to pay and how to pay. There is not even certainty that a vehicle that is compliant with one CAZ or the ULEZ will be compliant in another area.

As with the policy to promote electric vehicles, it appears that no consideration of the practicality of such policies has been considered. Perhaps the Government is intent on making driving so complicated that it puts people off doing so!!

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