Drivers in the English city of Bath may have noticed new parking charges this week. The cost of parking a car in one of the council’s car parks now varies depending on what you drive.
- Electric cars and small cars with low emissions pay the current price of £1.70 an hour
- Most petrol cars will pay £2 an hour
- Drivers of diesel cars will pay £2.30
- The biggest diesel SUVs face the highest charges at £2.50 an hour
That’s a snapshot of what is quite a complicated set of variable prices, depending on grams of CO2 per kilometre. Drivers don’t need to navigate this pricing menu – you just enter your licence plate at the ticket machine, and it consults the DVLA database to deliver the information and the price. If you park with an app, these can do this too. It’s easy to look up your own vehicle if you’re interested.
The aim of the scheme is to incentivise smaller and lower carbon vehicles in the town centre. This reduces air pollution, and also reduces carbon emissions. It makes roads safer by discouraging drivers of larger cars, which are worse for congestion and more dangerous to pedestrians.
Naturally there will be those who will react with tabloid “fury” and call it a cash grab. But the council have left parking charges as they are at the Park and Ride. You can park massive diesel cars there for the same price as anyone else. You only have to pay for the harm of that vehicle if you insist on taking it into the city.
This matters. The NHS describes air pollution as “the biggest environmental threat to health in the UK”. It contributes to between 28,000 and 36,000 deaths every year, and it costs the health service billions. Since half of all air pollution is from road traffic, it is entirely fair that more polluting cars contribute more to the social costs.
Bath is the latest of several councils that have adopted emissions-based parking. Lambeth introduced them in May, citing research that shows that air pollution kills 4,100 people in London every year. Reducing this pollution is a matter of public safety, and several London boroughs are using new parking charges as part of their clean air strategies. I wonder if Luton council could be persuaded.
- A couple of good books on air pollution: Breathe, by Sadiq Khan, and Breathless by Chris Woodford.
The Earthbound Report 
This is a really interesting piece BUT as usual is potentially unfair dis-advantaging those who have vehicles out of necessity – not because they can afford to.
Thanks Chimeme – you’re right, and I’d be interested to look at if/how the London boroughs have addressed this. I suspect that there is less of a problem with parking than there is with road use, like the ULEZ, which has really hit van drivers.
There must be ways of fairly pricing in pollution, because at the moment we are all paying for it with health costs, which hardly seems fair either!
I don’t disagree with having different charge bands based on the type of vehicle, even if that is a blunt instrument. I think I would have preferred it if the net increase in income to the council was closer to zero. I may be wrong but I don’t really see the increased income going to the health service to help pay for pollution-based illness. I think it may have been more of an incentive if the Diesel cars had stayed at £1.70 and the electric and petrol had been less, with the SUV type being more (obviously the numbers would need to be worked out to give a net zero increase). I think that just penalising drivers rather than incentivising them will make the council look bad.
Jim