Low emissions zones to be implemented accross Spain from next year
 

I thought this might be handy to note for anyone planning a trip for next year onwards: any city with more than 50K residents will be bringing in low emission zones to their city centers, and the existing zones for Madrid and Barcelona are going to be tightened (though by how much is yet to be seen due to court cases over it).

Under the Spanish classification scheme the vehicles affected are likely to be diesels from before 2006 and anything that burns petrol from before 2000 ("unclassified"). "B" class might be affected too, which is 2006-2014 for diesels and 2000-2006 for petrol.

I don't know how this will affect foreign plated vehicles, and the exact rules are going to vary a lot ... to confuse matters there are exceptions too, like my '93 Nissan Serena is classed as a B because it's officially a minibus.

I think we will see this increasingly around the world which will require travellers to consider the age of their vehicles more carefully, it is part of the reason I sold my old airhead BMWs last year and bought a new royal Enfield.

Just another reason to avoid cities.

And Western Europe perhaps :rolleyes2:

There is nothing more miserable than driving or riding through a busy city in any country.

It's always nicer to stay in the quiet and cheaper outskirts and take public transport in to visit.

I'm all for cities being 100% pedestrianised. They're dirty, noisy and smelly enough without traffic and fumes.

Although I can see this being a problem if you can't get to a ferry or shipper etc.

stupid laws and regulation in the end will have to end someday. If you don't want me to visit your city and leave some money no problem I will visit another. We will see who will be sorry in the end.

The cities have done the calculations and decided they are better off without you and your money.

Good on them. They are making better places to live.

No they aren't.

Leeds wants such a zone. I plan to leave anyway but this will speed things up. You need to sell before property prices crash . The result will be a shell populated by those too old or too lazy to get out. Working people don't have the time to faff about with peasant wagons, you can't carry tools on a bicycle, the taxes for daring to reject the collective will be insane . The woke elite will follow as endless coffee shops can no longer recruit staff and the new parks are taken over by druggies. They will of course finally be able to achieve their long term aim and change the cities name to Leningrad.

I haven't set foot in the current traffic managed zone for ten years. Better to travel 10+ miles the other way. How good for St. Gretas agenda is that?

Andy

Ummm, yes, well. Lots of pedestrian-only zones and lots of limited-engine zones in the world. No doubt some have caused inconvenience and property price crashes, but others I'm familiar with have been wildly successful for residents and businesses. Somehow there are always ways to get tools and materials where they need to be, and---miracle of miracles--very often such areas are not overrun by the "old" or "lazy," much less "druggies."

References to St. Greta or Leningrad don't really advance the discussion much. Why not engage on the merits and drawbacks, and leave the shopworn clichés behind?

I agree that localities considering these sorts of zones have already factored in the likelihood they'll never see some of us again. They don't seem too alarmed about that, so neither am I.

Ok, couple of points to make:

The Barcelona low emission zone specifically goes around the port and airport, so shipping is unaffected, other cities will be avoiding ports too.

Spain's cities are the most densely populated in Europe, and as such health problems from pollution are also the most severe. We also have a large number of very old vehicles compared to wealthier nations, which only makes things worse.

Many people who live here are keen to reduce the amount of tourism because it's a poisoned chalice causing a lot of harm for comparatively little benefit - of course, that's not necessarily the case in other cities that are less internationally famous.

From my point of view, this is going to cost me a lot of money but I'm happy to pay it to try and make the world a better place. I'll be scrapping my old Euro2 CBF within the next 2 years and will then use my Euro4 Rieju until I can afford a fully electric bike.

The other week I drove my old, barely euro3 or 2 or whatever diesel van from the south of Spain to Barcelona, in order to take a ferry to Italy and beyond. The Google Maps app I was navigating by warned me I would drive through a bit of the clean air zone. Then the main highway was blocked due to an accident, so I decided to divert even more into said zone in order reach the port that is right in the middle of downtown BCN.

I made my ship on time. Nobody stopped me. Nobody reacted negatively towards me, except some d!ck in an incredibly shiney looking luxury motor who seem surprised that I was asserting the fact I did have priority as per the signage and morally too because "might is right", as anyone who has driven in India knows :clap: Deep down I think he was also impressed at my ability to simultaneously drive a rusty old vehicle and use verbal and non verbal estuary English :innocent:

As has been said by others, I too loath cities and especially riding on them. I'm also culturally utterly dyslexic, so there's nothing there to see :helpsmilie: The average age of my exclusively carburettored fleet of 2 wheeled vehicles is around 24 years, so I'll stick to Castillan/ Catalan/ Basque rural areas and mountains.

PS. I did enjoy cities and towns like Sevilla and Ronda because it was warm and virtually tourist-free, it being winter and allegedly cold. Concrete jungles and their ancillary winnabagos like on the Costa del Sol coast were grim, but inland in the hills it was bliss as motorcycles are made for them and campervans most definitely aren't.

Sorry - you're victim of their propaganda.
FYI producing electricity and batteries creates more pollution then all combustion engines together. Diesels are today cleaner then gasoline cars, besides passengers cars are not the most polluting source. Heavy industry is.
Guess what the really reach people drive or fly - Jets, choppers, diesel and gasoline big limousines and SUVs. All that green BS is for poor mass...

Same here with Oxford. They've made it almost impossible to get to by car - unless you're a tourist with no time issues, in which case the park and ride scheme works well. But as you say, you can't carry tools on a bus. The cynic in me says they're trying to keep the 'town' out of the 'gown' areas so our future leaders don't have to mix with the common herd at any point at all other than the coach loads of admiring and well heeled foreign visitors that prop up the city's economy. If the council said they were going to build a wall round the place I don't think it would come as any surprise. All of this is justified on anti pollution grounds but the other three comparable conurbations in the area don't have any similar rules and seem to get on fine.

I'm down in the Grenoble area of France quite often and there's a substantial anti pollution zone in place there. Your car (not sure about bikes) has to be classified and categorised, and an appropriate sticker mounted on the windscreen. Thats been the case for a few years now and we've dutifully spent our €5 on stickers for the various vehicles we use. But I've never seen it enforced. I've been there summer and winter and never had an issue. If they're doing it by camera then they must be invisible. You'd think that riding through the city on a smoky old two stroke would have alarms going off everywhere but nothing has ever happened. I've wondered whether having the zone in place looks good on Grenoble's social tick list but actually enforcing it has an unacceptable economic price. Voters want to feel proud of their city's 'progressive agenda' but draw the line at it actually costing them money.

I know, I’ve been helping with the campaign for it (and the GALBA work against expansion of Leeds Bradford Airport)

Rachel, of Yeadon.

Now on Toytown Airport we agree. Should be closed, or turned back into a flying club, not because of green rubbish but because its hopeless. It was another Kremlin vanity scheme. They took over an airfield built to have the worst possible conditions for training purposes that was already isolated from any transport infrastructure by urbanisation. That's why it's a total lottery if your flight back will be cancelled. Better to drive to Manchester or Birmingham and know that's where you'll be coming back to. I've pretty much banned my team from using it. No point planning meetings while one of them is on a slow coach from Gatwick to pick up her car at Toytown.

Andy

Given that I'm an automotive engineer, I'd love to see your very legitimate sources on these assertions.

Don't hold your breath on that one. One thing that the anti-electric brigade always fail to factor in is that the materials in batteries are recyclable - virtually limitless numbers of times - and they are being recycled. It just doesn't fir their narrative.

A one year old Diesel car makes so much pollution per mile. You can't undo what was caused by making it or undo poor choices regarding recycling etc.

To scrap that perfectly good vehicle and replace it with an electric one produces more pollution. The level per mile is then less at the vehicle and probably less over all per mile. (Also it'll do fewer miles because of the hours it'll spend plugged in).

There is a break even point. The least pollution probably involves keeping the Diesel vehicle until worn out.

The break even point is not where green cultists and sellers of EV's want you to believe it is: every vehicle replaced now (and again in 18 months time for the sellers and again after that and... ).

There is additionally the efficiency of production. Older designs of EV and those made in small numbers will have the break even point later.

Andy
(also an Automotive Engineer)

That's a complete BS, even when you recycle a part of it you're still burning it.
I strongly just suggest you don't believe in everything you watch on TV, as matter of fact don't watch TV at all with all those green nuts.
Don't believe me either, do your own research and think for yourself.

Electricity for transportation is a dead end road.


p.s.
BTW not that it matters I am an electronic engineer and I love electricity.

As a well-informed electronic engineer you should know that 2 recycling ways of lithium ion battery exists: thermal melting and mechanical shredding. To state that they are simply burned is a confirmed BS.

In the process of melting, the battery cells are melted down. The different melting points allow the raw materials to be separated from each other. Cobalt, copper, nickel and lithium can be recovered to a large extent by the process. However, other materials such as graphite, electrolyte and aluminum are lost.

In the process shredding, the batteries are mechanically reduced in size and sorted into the individual raw materials in the further process. Shredding achieves a recycling rate of 96 percent and the raw materials from recovery are used, for example, in the production of new batteries.

The process of recycling the electric car battery can also save large amounts of CO2 emissions as opposed to new production.

And if electricity for transportation is a dead end road will be latestly decided in a couple of decades when the world reserves of oil are fully gone. Maybe engineers have found at that time a way to produce enormous quantities of electricity which you will definetly need to produce for e-fuels for use in engines with the lowest efficiency (if you compare fossile fuels powered engines with electric engines).

There's also a few schemes to use end-of-life car batteries for town power cells until they're completely unchargeable.

I remember a pro-fossil fuel study a while ago that said a Prius was more environmentally damaging than a new Jeep ... in the actual research they assumed that a Prius was built to last 70,000 miles and a Jeep 300,000. Of course, there are plenty of Prius' that get to around 250,000 miles before needing battery attention and even then it's possible to swap individual cells to keep the car going.

In other news, there's not going to be any scrapping of 1 year old diesels. I don't know about where other people are, but here people sell used cars to other people ... not everyone lives in cities, even here, so it'll have a knock-on effect of people in rural areas being able to get less polluting cars.

E.G. since 2018:
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/...car-batteries/

Speaking as a metallurgist I have to confirm Rapax’ statement - the recycling rate of metals in batteries in very high - the metallurgists have spent large amount of time an energy extracting the metals from their ores and so when there is a highly concentrated source - like batteries - they will extract the metal from there in preference -it is waaaaay cheaper and waaaay easier and uses just a small fraction of the energy used to get the metal in the first place.

I think that in a few years time there will be two forms of energy used for cars / bikes etc = batteries and hydrogen - and both of those are electric vehicles. The end of the internal combustion engine as a mass transport energy source is approaching.

Speaking as someone who likes travelling by motorcycle, I'm considering travelling to Asturias and Galicia and maybe ducking down into northern Portugal in the early summer, in order to ride stuff that was too cold and wet earlier this year. I'll likely avoid larger urban areas, not because of their clean air zones, but because my carburettored motorcycle is more fun in the hills and mountains.

(Not a mech/ elec/ auto engineer, nor a metalurgist, so unable to stray off topic).

Hi, on the subject of pedestrianising city centers. For many years (since 1987 until 2021) I was a motorcycle courier in London.
Over the past 5 years or more there has been a creeping policy of pedestrianising the streets of the West End and City and other areas.
This has nothing to do with low emissions, purely banning all vehicles from certain areas, including electric and low emissions vehicles.
The end result being it is impossible to deliver to these areas without getting a fine or a parking ticket.
An example of this, you have a delivery to make to an address in a no vehicle, pedestrians only street. So you get as close as you can to that street and park up in a loading bay or on a single yellow line ( where you are allowed to do when making a delivery). You wander off to make the delivery, then on your return you find you have been given a parking ticket.
Naturally you appeal the parking ticket. But often the appeal is unsuccessful because you are only allowed a few minutes to deliver or the traffic warden didn't see you making a delivery ( well if you are delivering to a different better he wouldn't see you).
So for doing your job you have to pay the fine £60 or more, half a days earnings.
That was one reason why I packed up being a motorcycle courier last year.
Eventually the companies in these areas will find it impossible to function without these deliveries being made. The companies will close down or move out of city centers.
Once they move out these areas will die, no companies, no customers for the cafes, restaurants and shops.
A real genius policy!!!!!!!!

This arguing seems rather pointless. When Honda, Yamaha, Suzuki, and/or Kawasaki have electric motorcycles on the local dealership floor, I'll consider buying one - and we aren't there yet.

I believe Volvo are the only manufacturer who make the same model with the choice of both ICE and EV.
Assuming you aren't going to throw away an ICE before buying your EV, in comparing both they say the carbon footprint break even point is 200,000km. Less if the electricity used to recharge comes from a low carbon source.


https://www.volvocars.com/images/v/-...int-report.pdf

Steady on there Chicken Little. There have been LEZs in the UK and many other cities round the world for years with no trace of a property price crash. If anything the residents appreciate the cleaner air. Taxes on commuters from outside the zones are generally welcomed by residents of the zones, see if you can guess why.

But if you want to pay the £20,000 or so it costs to move house these days so you don't have to buy a bike that's less than 10 years old, that's your choice of course.

Not sure if you've been into many city centres since leaving your courier job, but the ones I've seen seem to be managing to thrive. Deliveries get made outside peak times, people use park and ride schemes, etc. The only places where centres are in serious decay are the ones where employment levels are chronically low already. Traffic is the least of their problems.

Your brand loyalty is admirable but remember, the world's biggest manufacturer of electric cars didn't even start producing cars until 2008, and that was in an environment when EV technology was largely unknown, unlike today when it's common.

I wouldn't buy an EV myself today, but not because I think they're a buzzkill or somehow untrustworthy, rather due to concerns over weight, range and recharging, particularly out in the boonies. Maybe in future that'll become a non issue. Certainly as an urban commuter right now they're a no-brainer. And you don't need to scrap off your 1-year-old oilburner to do it, just sell it on and let somebody else run it in the knowledge that when it eventually dies they'll be buying an EV themselves to replace it.

Honestly, the degree of luddism on here is shocking. Not aimed at you brclarke but some of the guys... doh

Interesting debate, for the most part.

I love my older oil burners, simple to maintain,will run on anything,and were orginally designed to last and last vs today's almost planned obsolete versions.

Those days will not come around again, today manufacturers honestly design to a price point and factor in all sorts of details that were never a concern to designers 30 years ago. And this goes for everything from washing machines to airplane's.

I wont bemoan that, because I cant change those things. Manufactures tell us they build want buyers want, and they seem to get it right most of the time, because folks do buy,perhaps because they have limited choice (price, availability,warranty coverage, included service plan, ect ect) or maybe they really do want that stuff!period.

I do almost all my own maintenance on everything I can, from the house heat pump to my vehicles and everything in between, What I most blown away by, is how crappy a lot of the stuff we buy today is, cheaply made with lots of plastic parts that only snap together once,poor fastener choices,thin sheet metal, name it. Again, nothing I can do about this, as almost every brand of everything has these elements in it.Therefor your choices are limited.

As I have "aged", my biggest gripe is trying to find value in what I purchase, quite hard to do in most consumer products.

In respect to electric vehicles, I am not a fan, but not for the reasons that I like the "noise" a ICE makes, its mainly that fact that I need to spend quite a bit of money to acquire one, and that they are loaded with "features" that I am not really wanting to pay for or want.

But recently on a trip to Portugal I was able to test drive a 2022 Dacia Spring,my god I fell in love,inexpensive to purchase,very easy to drive,and not bogged to the gunnels with "tech", it was just a car with with an electric drive train! How refreshing!

I live near Montreal, I would have one in a heartbeat to commute to the office and do perhaps 90 plus percent of my runs, it has heat,A/C and a radio.5 doors and seating for 4,Awesome! 20K euro including VAT.

Looking at the Dacia, it would need to be slightly adapted for our climate here (there is no underbody splash pan under the mechanical bit up front,and the salty snow would just decimate that). Also since in North America many folks would not know why there can be 3 pedals in a vehicle, they would need to incorporate a P (park) detent in the gear selector,lest we would have run away Dacia's everywhere as no one knows about hand brake use(Parking brakes) here.


I think cities would be nice places if we didnt have the cars and trucks that run through the place all the time (ICE versions), in Montreal they drive 45ft semi trucks through the middle of the city all the time for deliveries ect, silly ,stupid and wasteful , but the high cost of alternatives make it hard to justify the transport companies cost to change the fleet.

So I think we can go ahead and make these LEZ's, but give us (at least in North America) the choices to purchase some of these low power,limited range,shrewdly built vehicles that we can purchase new for 20K, I promise I would the first in line to buy one.

This would save my old Land Cruiser,4Runner and Range Rover for the further away or load carrying jobs that they were designed for.

I may be talking out of my butt here, but as I do have a house with a place to park and recharge the vehicle it would do me nicely, but for those living in more densely populated housing or no on street charging, the electric vehicle dream is not realistic yet, and that fault lies with the cities and governments that talk a good talk, but rarely have to live with the actual facts on the ground.

Anyways, enough of that. Thing change,either by design or decree. I dont have to like it,but I would like my choices to be mine.

Cheers,

Paulo

I quite like the ‘ambience’ that’s been built into fuel driven vehicles- the noise (not the volume so much as the timbre), the driving characteristics etc, but not to the point where if electric vehicles were more practical for the sort of driving / riding I do I wouldn’t jump ship in an instant. Unfortunately they’re not - yet anyway. And if what I saw last week ‘yet’ might be quite some time.

We drove about 300 miles north from our house near Oxford, most of it on the M1 + A1 combination that’s the main artery north. We stopped at two main service stations and looked at what electric charging facilities were available. The answer was three charging points at one and two at the other. That in areas with over 500 cars parked while the owners were taking a break. All the charging points were in use so if you’d turned up with a flat battery it might be a long wait. In the town where I live there are no public charging points at all. Lots of private ones but if you’re a tourist in an electric car, good luck.

I’d be happy to drive electric but not the way things are at present. They’re overpriced and only suitable for commuting 10 or 20 miles each way to work. Anything else becomes an expedition rather than a journey.

A relative has an EV. The range on his is around 300 miles depending on the weight of his right foot - he uses it for his work, and he does around 25,000 mile per annum. His only comment about the availability of charging points is that he now plans a little bit more than he used to. Would he go back to fossil fuel? Not any time soon.

The number of charging points is going up as the number of petrol stations falls. In years to come it will be a case of those using petrol / diesel will be the ones having to do the planning of where to refuel.

One of the big selling points of electric vehicles is that they cost so little to run ( once you have bought one).
So assuming you have just spent £20,000- £100,000 on your brand new eco friendly vehicle, what will you do with it?
Will you leave it parked in your garage, drive, street being charged up or will you use it.
If it is actually cheaper to drive your electric vehicle than use public transport, a bus, a train, you will choose to drive your electric vehicle.
End result being that people who previously used public transport to commute work will instead switch to using their electric vehicles. After all it is cheaper and oh so kinder to the planet than gas burners.
So towns and cities will become more congested with electric vehicles.
Right now electric vehicles do not seem to have to pay fees to drive in city centers. If in 5-10 years when the traffic jams are entirely made up of electric vehicles what will governments and councils do? Either raise the price of car charging points or start charging electric vehicles to drive in town and cities.
And what if everyone was to buy an electric vehicle.
Charging will be fine if you have your own garage or drive to park and charge your vehicle. But the vast majority don't have these. So will we see long extension cables dangling from high rise flats so as to charge your vehicle, or disputes between neighbours as to who has use of the limited charging points in the street.
Oh yes, electric vehicles are portrayed as so cool, trendy and will save the earth in the TV adverts, but so much needs to be resolved before they are the answer to pollution and congestion.

Indeed, there needs to be changes to the way that people interact with each other. The pandemic has demonstrated that there is less need to have face to face every time and that Zoom / Teams can replace some of the face to face - but not everything can be done that way.

Personally, I suspect that there will be a continued and accelerating (pun intended) shift towards car sharing in cities - this means that the pressure on the roads may be reduced, recharging the batteries is done more easily as the car share parking spaces will have dedicated charging points. In cities the major criteria for choosing a particular mode of transport are convenience, price, journey time etc - this still means that public transport will be the primary way people move around many cities as there is little point sitting in a car, whether owned or shared, in a traffic jam. So is the rise of the electric car the end of public transport - I very much doubt it.

I have a strange feeling that there will not be too many wires dangling from blocks of flats. People arguing about charging points - most likely, in the same way that some people want to push into queues, park badly taking up two spaces etc

Lets face it, fossil fuels are on their way out and as yet the only contenders for the crown are electric and hydrogen - but we have two crowns - one for petrol and one for diesel so is it really an either or situation?

A change in lifestyle is going to be needed if people are going to survive in relative comfort.

The last I read Seville is proposing an end to any internal combustion vehicles in the city center by 2030 - that's the sort of thing that needs to be done everywhere, combined with superblocks etc, both to improve quality of life and coax people into changing their ways. Certainly my preference would be to use park-and-ride schemes for visiting cities when I have to (or rent a little electric scooter or something)

There is now a requirement for all vehicles going into certain French cities to have a vignette related to the emissions of the vehicle. Failing to have the vignette can lead to a fine many times the cost of the vignette (which costs less than £10 including postage).

https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/news/motoring-news/law-change-for-uk-drivers-in-french-cities/

They can be sourced before going to France from the French government web site here - https://www.certificat-air.gouv.fr/. It is recommended that you use the government site to avoid rip off fees from third party websites - you have to give the same information and they are unlikely to be any quicker and possibly slower.

I can see that being the form of the future, at least in prosperous countries. But before it can work it'll need two things: (1) extensive investment in widespread charging infrastructure, and (2) extensive investment in a good public transport network.

Levels of vehicle ownership in London, for example, are low, due to the limited usefulness of private transport and the cost and space needed to own a vehicle. Public transport is well developed and for most people is the easiest way to get around. So EV-only city centres are certainly viable. The barriers to making it happen are in the hands of the authorities. Are they willing to spend the money to develop the charging and public transport networks to replace the ICE vehicles they ban?

It does seem that Government and Local Authorities first action is to charge or fine motorists for driving the 'wrong vehicles' in city centers.
They fail or are very slow in introducing charging points for electrical vehicles.
I live west of London and I did a quick search for electric charging points within 5 miles of me, there are less than 20. This includes much of Heathrow airport, which has vast car parks, but very few charging points.
The others are either at petrol stations or in car parks at large supermarket, very few are on the street or operated by the local council.
London does have more charging points, but no way enough for even the existing electric vehicles.
So either they very rapidly install these or there will be a lot of electric vehicles with flat batteries.
And what happens in 5-10 years time, when all vehicles are electric? Will the chargers be cheap to use or will they gradually become more expensive as the demand for them increases?
And where will this electricity come from? Solar and wind power are fine, but you will still need the back up of gas, coal and nuclear power plants for those days when it is overcast, cloudy and no wind.
Solar power plans and wind farms take up vast areas and don't always produce enough electricity. No one wants a gas, coal or nuclear power plant near to them, so looks like the lights will go out and batteries will go flat, unless someone has a cunning plan.....

There's generally very good public transport in Spanish cities (most people don't need a car to live), so I'm guessing that people who do need a car but can't afford an electric one will have to park outside the center and use public transport to get to it, at least for the time being ... or they'll have to use ride shares or car subscription services.

TBH it'd be nice if cities had less cars in general, even electric ones. The superblocks in Barna are excellent examples of how nice it is when there's less traffic in general!

There are a number of renewable sources of electricity. Some are weather dependant - solar and wind - but others are in development that will provide the base load - these include tidal and geothermal. Tidal is totally predictable. Geothermal is perhaps the most exciting as that can be used practically anywhere. The cars that are attached to charging points can act as reservoirs for power for the grid so that surplus electricity can be stored easily and at little additional cost - obviously this has to be done to allow the vehicle to be used later so can't drain off all the power.

There are also plans and designs for far smaller nuclear reactors and there is a consortium to finish the development and to productionise the end result.

Will the lights go out? Unlikely. Will continued use of fossil fuels make the planet's climate unacceptably hot? Undoubtedly. For those that don't believe that we are making a pigs ear of the climate consider this - during the palaeozoic mass extinction the rate of CO2 being emitted into the atmosphere by the planet was around 0.6 trillion tonnes per year - currently we are emitting around 8 trillion tonnes per year - 1330% more per year - now think about what the event was called the Palaeozoic MASS extinction. Do we really want to have that happen in our or our childrens lifetimes?

No matter how small a nuclear power plant is, no one will want one near them. Planning will take years, then many, many years of public consultation, legal objections, court appeals, government inquiries, more appeals etc.
Then even if the go ahead is given it will take 5, 10, 15 years or more to build.
As to tidal, yes all very good, very predictable and would provide lots of reliable energy. Downside is it would destroy many tidal estuaries, tidal ecosystems, a loss of valuable habitat for birds and other animals. Not exactly being kind to the planet..

Your comment and your questions implicate that we will have the same traffic senario as now but through using electrified verhicles.

That won`t work because sustainable traffic needs differents characteristics to function. Sustainable traffic has to be sustainable by ecological sense and it has to be socially fair and economical successful. Otherwise it will miss the power of assertiveness.

The traffic of future must be less space intense and it must include much more collective/public transport opportunities. This should be the base care for traffic in urban zones which will be complemented for the last individual miles by Sharing-Mobility and by electric vehicles.

We will never solute the climate problem and the problem of exhaustible raw materials if don`t change our behavior in the way how we do traffic in the future. To electrify all kind of vehicles and to use them in the same way as we do it now with fossile fuel powered verhicles will not work as solution for existing problems.

I know this is something which you maybe don`t want to hear in forum where people who mostly avoid public transport systems in their travels and use highly self-sufficient vehicles to explore everything everywhere. :)

Would, be those tidal estuaries that will be eradicated by sea level rise, ecosystems destroyed by global warming? Also the tide is not stopped, just harnessed so the damage will be limited. One of the places with greatest potential is the Menai Straits as the speed of the flow of water is phenomenal.

On the other hand I do like to go to places that aren’t just another desert that used to be a very nice place to visit / live so perhaps changing our behaviours may be a good thing. Not that there is anything wrong with deserts, it is just that I think there are about the right number now without creating anymore.

I do agree that there are many areas which would be ideal for tidal power, yes the Menai Straits. But on plan or proposal is for the Bristol Channel, somewhere near the Seven Bridge. That whole streach of river is mudflats, tidal estuaries, reed beds. It simply wouldn't function if the tide was slowed down or stopped.

Ever slightly off topic.
Recently I saw a TV advert for an electric SUV, 4x4, I think it might have been a Volvo.
Anyway the advert showed shots of the SUV driving into the wilderness, splashing though streams, fording rivers, negotiating boulders and dirt tracks ( without it seems getting very dirty).
The final shot was of the SUV parked in a clearing, on top of a mountain, miles from anywhere, no signs of civilization or even a electricity pilon, yet there in the middle of nowhere was a electric vehicle charging point!!!!
So it seems you can go to the ends of the earth and still find a charging point to take you home.
It made me chuckle.....

The mud flats would also cease to function under an additional couple of meteres of water. The point about the barrier affecting ecosystems is all very well except that the argument falls flat when the effects of doing nothing are taken into account - I wonder sometimes about the effects that rising sea levels will have on places like Florida - I suspect that there will be a significantly smaller state in a few decades time.

The tidal power statiion requires water flow so there will still be the tides, so the mud flats will still be covered and exposed on the same timescales, just that the water will flow sets of turbines generating electricity.

Well I look forward to technology solving the worlds problems, even if much of the technology is far from ready, hasn't been installed or doesn't even exist.
We will just have to hope it all arrives in time.

I think all this worry and fretting about emission stickers on tourist vehicles is not necessary.

The countries that are bringing in emissions regulations for cities are aiming to have those regulations influence what kind of vehicles their RESIDENTS and DAILY COMMUTERS use. That's where 99% of the potential emissions reduction will come from.

I suspect that once enforcement begins and we begin to see how and when local authorities enforce these rules, we will see that their focus is on local vehicles (e.g. going through parking lots, looking at the stickers on vehicles parked along the streets), and they will most likely not be very interested in harassing a tourist, simply because:

1) There's nothing to be gained from it, they won't be solving a long-term problem, and;

2) No doubt local authorities (town councils, tourist boards, etc.) will recommend that the enforcement team tread lightly on tourists, because they might quite innocently not be aware of the rules.

So, let's not get stressed about a potential problem until it actually does turn into a problem... which I doubt it will.

Michael

the only world problem is stupid people. doh

good thing is some countries are waking up and coming back to old energy source and that trend is growing.

Which ones; coal mines or windmills? :rofl:

In what way is going backwards to coal good? It puts out far more CO2 than other fuels, it puts out far more sulphur dioxide than other fuel, it puts out more particulates than other fuels - none of these are beneficial which ever way you look at them. In short, coal is the dirtiest fuel going and the sooner the world stops using it altogether the better.

It would be better if Germany restarted their nuclear power stations that they closed in the wake of the Fukushima flood following the tsunami - not that any of the German power plants were near to a fault in the tectonic plates doh

That might be good - if our species wasn't also engaging in massive deforestation of the planet at the same time.

For plants to consume all that extra CO2, we actually have to let them grow and exist.

Plants also like water. Just not so that they are submerged for weeks on end (aquatic plants aside). And your evidence that climate change is fake is what? I didn’t start out listening to mainstream media talking about climate change when I first heard about it, it was on the fringes initially and in technical journals but the evidence to show that it is happening ended up being so great that the mainstream media had little choice to accept it or else look incredibly stupid.

From an efficiency perspective having all those filters to block CO2, SO2 particulates etc reduces the efficiency so why not skip that problem entirely and stop burning coal? Find cleaner alternatives that are more efficient. For instance Australia has the opportunity to generate vast amounts of power from the sun - the technology is coming through that allows power generation after the sun has gone down - so the only things stopping lots of countries going down that route are the fossil fuel producers buying politicians and, to be blunt, idiocy - why dig up fuel (expensive), transport it (expensive), burn it (dirty and inefficient) when the sun comes up very day with a fraction of the running costs after the initial build (which is less than a coal burning power station). Other sources of very green power complement solar - wind, tidal, hydro, geothermal etc - and all are sustainable for the long term.

Well, I posted this so that travellers have an idea of whats coming so they can be prepared, and now we're down to the point of conspiracy theories.

In a forum that's all about widening one's horizons and seeing the beauty of the world I would have thought people would have been a little more sympathetic to environmental issues.

We try to maintain a low level of moderation, but will always step in when in comes to name calling and overtly critical comments. By all means disagree with other people's opinions, but please do it in a friendly manner.

Variety being the spice of life (as they say), differing opinions are welcome here. We'll all do well to address *issues,* not the presumed intelligence, gullibility, or malicious intent of other people, whether here or elsewhere in the world.

It will also serve us well to think about whether our own posts tend to elevate the level of discourse, or drag is down into the muck. The former is good; the latter not so much.

Mark

Thanks a lot Chris.....i've just sprayed tea over my feckin laptop....ah well it was time for a new one anyway. Maybe I can make some money recycling the battery

The subject is low emissions zones to be implemented across Spain from next year.

And there we go again. Others on this thread have expressed support for emission controls, and then you use words like stupidity again.

You are of course welcome to disagree with other people's opinions, but please do it in a friendly manner that doesn't cause others to report your posts.

Is there any chance at all of getting this back on topic. I'm heading down to Spain in a few days in a highly polluting vehicle (two of them actually) and it would be handy to know what the current regs / restrictions are. Maybe we can push the bikes through those bits.

There's nothing to worry about 'till next year, the low-emission zone around Barcelona is in place (IIRC Madrid has one too) but it's more slack than the London one and is easy to go around if you're not going to the city itself.

Next year is still up in the air, only Seville has already published their plan as far as I know. Other cities might be putting stuff together for the autumn because at the moment half the country is on holiday.