You'll Now Be Charged Extra To Drive An Old Car Into London

With the war on emissions heating up, the London Mayor has introduced a 'T-Charge' that applies an extra £10 per day tax to anyone driving into the city centre in an older car

Matt Kimberley

24 Oct 2017

You'll Now Be Charged Extra To Drive An Old Car Into London

You’ll now be charged even more if you want to drive an old car into London. Pass the roadside signs in a car whose emission standards are Euro III or earlier and you’ll have to pay a total of £21.50 for every day you do so. This is the new London T-Charge.

The extra tenner on top of the existing £11.50 Congestion Charge will go straight to London’s coffers, but it’s not yet clear what the money will be spent on. Rough estimates put the number of drivers affected by the extra tax as 6500 per day. That’s theoretically an extra couple of million rolling in annually.

Aimed at cutting nitrogen oxide levels by half after two years, which it will probably do as effectively as the Congestion Charge cut traffic (i.e. not so you’d notice), the T-Charge affects the exact same area as the Congestion Charge – for now.

Environmental campaigners and people who like to write angry things on the Internet are calling for the T-Charge zone to be expanded in 2019 to cover all of Greater London from the North Circular to the South Circular roads. That, as anyone who knows the city will tell you, covers the vast majority of places that you might actually want to get to.

While cars will be lumbered with the £10 charge, coaches, buses and HGVs will have to stump up £100 per day. Expect those Megabus and National Express prices to look steep next time you book.

Comments

I think I should don my Captain Obvious hat when I say that this is not going to work; people have just become too reliant on cars to get into London these days, and simply charging them more (especially, as others have mentioned, charging those likely to be less well-off) won’t change that. I wonder if a charge that scaled based on the amount of road-space a car took up would work better instead; you see all these large 4x4s in London, all completely pointless in a city, and wonder just how much traffic would be reduced if all the 4x4 drivers in London drove into the city in, say, a hatchback instead. Less stationary traffic immediately means less pollution.

London just wants to say they‘re cooler and better than Paris at “preparing for the future,“ that’s why they did this!

Oh dear…

Oh guess what! It’s an old-ish Range Rover! I hope she sues the shlt out of the people who made this new rule!

I am not sure the people making these laws have realized that right now electric cars are not better than petrol. There are not enough electricity, and batteries are bad to make.

But batteries aren’t made in central London, which is where they are trying to decrease pollution

What are all those trendy londoners going to do with their rat style golfs?

Wow,Mr.Buzzkill right at it again…… What next?A totalitarian act of banning all modes of transport?What do you think this is North Korea (not offending North Korea here)