Sunday, November 27, 2011
Moaning off at half cock
The first moan was my own and resulted from a train ride into London earlier this week. A pretty young lady came and sat in a seat opposite, pulled out a whole lot of what looked like photocopies of pictures and proceeded to cut them out with a small pair of scissors. Perhaps she was a student doing a project for our University of the Creation Arts. As she cut, she brushed the bits and pieces onto the floor around her. Not very good, I thought to myself. What are the yuff of today coming too. Doesn't it occur to them that some of us have to sit at look at the mess they are making and that someone else will have to come and clear it up? What to do? She was probably less than half my weight so scarcely in a position to be physically intimidating, although she might turn out to have something of a mouth on her. Playing safe, I stared at her until she noticed - perhaps 10 seconds - then glanced down to the mess on the floor: she got the idea but quickly looked away. Shall I move to the next level? But after about a further 30 seconds without further eye contact, she had a go at clearing it all up. She was reasonably successful in this, so it seemed to sensible to let the matter rest, having lost my opportunity for a proper moan.
The second moan was in TB, where there has been much huffing and puffing over the last few days about something called EURO IV, the name of the latest government initiative to bash hard working and decent van drivers. The story was that anyone driving an older diesel van - which appeared to equate for practical purposes to any older van - will have to pay £100 for each day on which the van enters London, or rather the GLC. Most of the hard working van drivers working around here need to enter London - which starts for these purposes just a couple of miles up the road - several times a week and at £100 a pop this is not going to work. So they are being forced to buy a new van, possibly years before they might otherwise have gotten around to it. What about the poor old older van driver, coming up to retirement, who might not want to invest in a new van at this stage of his career? Is it fair that the second hand value of older vans is now about zero? That these people should have their working capital wiped out by a stroke of the Bullingdon Boris pen? Is if fair that all those posh people driving Chelsea tractors, far worse in this regard than a well cared for van, are not contributing at all? Some members of the TB were getting quite angry about it all and were in no way mollified by my praise of the Bullingdon Bike scheme.
I thought I ought to take a look at the matter, starting out at the quite helpful pages on the subject at the TfL site. From which I gleaned two factlets. One, the new rules coming in in January, part of a long running Europe wide drive for a healthier atmosphere in which to live and work, are about particulate matter from older diesel commercial vehicles, or older diesel vehicles which look a bit commercial. Only a few private cars will be hit by them. And, roughly speaking, the new rules only apply to vehicles more than 6 years old, so most fleet operators will not be affected: they turn their stuff over faster than that. But the small operators out of former council estates will be affected. So the new rules are a selective tax on them and their occupations. Two, one does not have to scrap a non compliant vehicle. In most cases it will suffice to fit a filter - which might cost between £1,000 and £2,000, but which would be rather less than a new van. I guess that the story had been simplified a little for easier consumption over the Amber Nectar. The spirit of the thing is what is important, not the tiresome details.
I then asked about EURO IV matters more generally and found myself looking at a much more complicated story in Wikipedia. Fine bit of euro babble. Probably all very well intentioned and reasonable, but sadly rather complicated. Decided that I would not press the matter any further.
But all in all a reminder of how hard it is both to be fair and to be seen to be fair when doing good.
The second moan was in TB, where there has been much huffing and puffing over the last few days about something called EURO IV, the name of the latest government initiative to bash hard working and decent van drivers. The story was that anyone driving an older diesel van - which appeared to equate for practical purposes to any older van - will have to pay £100 for each day on which the van enters London, or rather the GLC. Most of the hard working van drivers working around here need to enter London - which starts for these purposes just a couple of miles up the road - several times a week and at £100 a pop this is not going to work. So they are being forced to buy a new van, possibly years before they might otherwise have gotten around to it. What about the poor old older van driver, coming up to retirement, who might not want to invest in a new van at this stage of his career? Is it fair that the second hand value of older vans is now about zero? That these people should have their working capital wiped out by a stroke of the Bullingdon Boris pen? Is if fair that all those posh people driving Chelsea tractors, far worse in this regard than a well cared for van, are not contributing at all? Some members of the TB were getting quite angry about it all and were in no way mollified by my praise of the Bullingdon Bike scheme.
I thought I ought to take a look at the matter, starting out at the quite helpful pages on the subject at the TfL site. From which I gleaned two factlets. One, the new rules coming in in January, part of a long running Europe wide drive for a healthier atmosphere in which to live and work, are about particulate matter from older diesel commercial vehicles, or older diesel vehicles which look a bit commercial. Only a few private cars will be hit by them. And, roughly speaking, the new rules only apply to vehicles more than 6 years old, so most fleet operators will not be affected: they turn their stuff over faster than that. But the small operators out of former council estates will be affected. So the new rules are a selective tax on them and their occupations. Two, one does not have to scrap a non compliant vehicle. In most cases it will suffice to fit a filter - which might cost between £1,000 and £2,000, but which would be rather less than a new van. I guess that the story had been simplified a little for easier consumption over the Amber Nectar. The spirit of the thing is what is important, not the tiresome details.
I then asked about EURO IV matters more generally and found myself looking at a much more complicated story in Wikipedia. Fine bit of euro babble. Probably all very well intentioned and reasonable, but sadly rather complicated. Decided that I would not press the matter any further.
But all in all a reminder of how hard it is both to be fair and to be seen to be fair when doing good.
# posted by Jim @ 4:32 AM 
