YEP Letters: December 6

City ‘Clean air zone’ charges plan: your views

Buses and taxis and lorries could be hit with daily £100 fines as Leeds City Council chiefs aim to improve the quality of the city’s air. The fines are part of proposals unveiled by the local authority as it looks to create a Clean Air Zone (CAZ). The council needs to lower the city’s road emissions after it was named as one of 29 local authorities whose roads breached legal pollution levels. Road emissions must be less than 40mcg per cubic metre of nitrogen dioxide otherwise it is a breach of law. Exceedances of this limit currently take place in select spots within the city. The new proposals would create a CAZ that covers all roads within the Leeds outer ring road with motorways acting as the southern boundary. We asked YEP readers for their views on the proposals and here’s what some of them said on social media..

Jane Ormsby

Would drivers using the affected areas find alternative routes, therefore causing more congestion?

£100 per day for HGVs, £12.50 per day for taxis? What planet do these councillors live on? And what is this generated money going to be spent on? How will it “clean up the air”? There’s still going to be pollution around. China is the biggest culprit in the world for the amount of pollution it churns out, some of it what we are probably breathing in at some point and how does encouraging drivers to go electric make it pollution free? How is electricity generated? Or could the money they hope to generate be used to bring the high rise flats etc up to fire safety standards? After all they need to find £55m or so. So once again they hit the commuters. Maybe all these cycle lanes were put there for a reason, to get us all to ditch our cars and buy a bike instead!

Peter Smith

Basically another cash cow. How will this be monitored? Presumably by cameras which will need to be placed on every road entering Leeds.The bus companies will no doubt be increasing fares for their new buses, plus a further increase for this charge, smaller companies using buses for school work will start to put in increased tenders. Taxi companies will put up charges, many folk use taxis to go into Leeds on coach holidays, are they expected to carry luggage on an inefficient,irregular bus service? Prices in restaurants, cafes, and all businesses in Leeds will increase owing to the delivery service, which in turn will more than likely offer job losses. What about the smaller van man, disabled users, council transport? Could be an interesting one, ambulances, fire engines, police cars, hospital appointments etc.

Calden Batt

It makes no sense, they’ll fine anything that isn’t Euro6 emissions fair enough that’s pretty much anything that’s 15 plate onwards, then it says about fining trucks but the emissions law for HGV is much tighter than a car/van they are probably running Euro 7 by now. I get why they are doing it but as normal LCC screw it up. Let’s fine a bus! Next sentence, we want everyone on public transport, yeah whatever.

Martin Walker

So everything goes up in price. Brilliant idea! Only people to suffer? The average person. Bus fairs go up, prices of goods go up, taxi fares go up. Because it’s a circle of pain that fixes nothing. Wait for the city centre to become a ghost town. Shops shut down, apartments become empty, people shop elsewhere. But at least the air will be cleaner for the homeless and criminals.

Anthony Wrigglesworth

Do away with the loop system and a lot of the traffic lights and free up the traffic flow then there won’t be much standing traffic. 
Hence less pollution in the city centre.

June Holliday

Another excuse to put bus fares up or going in a taxi. Watch shopkeepers start moaning about no one going into town.

Paul Wormstone

Nothing to do with improving air quality, everything to do with making money for the council, to make up for the Tory cuts. Why don’t they just admit it? We aren’t fools.

Janjan Loreal Wilkinson

Great, another reason for bus companies to up their fares. Where’s the logic. Instead of getting more people to use public transport it will cause more congestion. The bus companies won’t pay for this, commuters will!

Aiden Fryer

It wouldn’t make any difference, I live in Morley right next to the motorway and there’s probably twice as much pollution from the motorway. Does that mean these rules apply to them too? And what about other areas that also have motorway that runs through their towns?

Michael Kerr

Stupid idea. Council should be encouraging the thousands of car drivers that clog up Leeds roads on a daily basis to use public transport when commuting to work. Also making roads wider and more efficient traffic signals would help. The reason air quality is so bad is because no one can actually get anywhere.

Vee O’Brien

I would be quite happy to use public transport more if we had a viable system like other cities. I only live a few miles out of town and the bus service is appalling.

James Fletcher

Suppose it all depends where they feel the need to charge. If it’s anything from the M1 & M621 through Stourton there will be alot of people who technically don’t work in the city but get stung by the charge.

Sarah Flynn

Yes, let’s pass more costs onto the taxpayer instead of actually bringing in government policies to tackle climate change directly – such as mandating companies to spend their profits on electric lorries etc instead of handing those profits to shareholders every quarter.

Ken Quinn

Fantastic idea LCC. But remember this. The end user will pay for it in increased costs and jobs could well be lost because of it in the city.

Paul Leppington

Why does LCC do everything they can against buses in Leeds? There is no bus priority in Leeds even in and out of the bus station they have to wait for the cars.

David Hargreaves

Just another money making scheme. Leeds will be a ghost town soon.

Thanks for Sixties show

Terry Maunder, Kirkstall

I would like to thank all the artists/bands, support staff like sound engineers and lighting etc, the audience and the ambience of The Grand itself for a great Sunday afternoon for the Sixties Gold concert.

Sadly Gerry Marsden is ill so The Pacemakers did not appear but The Merseybeats stood in for them. We all sang to You’ll Never Walk Alone when they played it in honour of Gerry (I had been particularly looking forward to that one).

Had a good chat with the man sitting next to me and the whole atmosphere was great. The bassist of The Searchers made us smile with his comment about them all being of a certain vintage when he pointed out that members of other bands were absent due to illness as well (The Tremeloes and The Searchers themselves).

Some people even got up and had a good hobble. Thanks all.

Cycle track ‘white elephant’

Shaun Kavanagh, by email

Leeds City Council’s (LCC) regeneration, transport and planning (RTP) department strike again by wasting even more money in Stanningley.

This time, as outlined by Coun Andrew Carter, (YEP November 30) it is due to the shambolic so called cycle superhighway i.e. cycle tracks running along the A647 through Stanningley Bottom and all because of the bad design and construction having to be re-visited.

The ill thought through cycle track scheme introduced, yet used by few, creates mayhem for motorists on a daily basis.

LCC talk of the cycle tracks being shared space but that is totally inaccurate as now proved which, in itself, shows a lack of foresight at the outset 
by the RTP department and LCC.

Motorists cannot use the cycle tracks and cyclists rarely do, so why spend over £100m, an amount still rising?

In short the cycle tracks are “white elephants” within Leeds and extremely expensive elephants to boot.

Help support kidney patients

Paddy Tabor MVO, Chief Executive, Kidney Care UK

I wanted to appeal to your readers to ask them their used stamps this Christmas and donate them to Kidney Care UK to help us raise much needed funds for kidney patients.

Every Christmas more than 1 billion cards are sent in the UK and for every 1kg of used stamps donated we can raise as much as £20 to help people with chronic kidney disease.

There are 64,000 people being treated for kidney failure in the UK right now and 187 people are currently waiting for a transplant in West Yorkshire.

Your support will help us to provide practical, financial and emotional support for kidney patients and their families when they need it most; we believe no-one should face kidney disease alone, and especially to hold on to not at Christmas. You can read and download our step by step guide to collecting and donating used stamps at www.kidneycareuk.org Finally, we hope all of your readers have a wonderful Christmas and a fantastic new year.

Make a pledge for charity

Stephanie Stone, Revitalise

In celebration of Giving Tuesday and the Big Give this month, I’d like to take a moment to tell your readers how in giving a gift to our charity, you’ll be making a real difference.

I work for Revitalise, an incredible national charity that provides respite holidays for disabled people and carers at our three accessible UK holiday centres.

Our respite holiday centres are open to our guests all year round, including over Christmas and the New Year.

As a charity we know that it isn’t just what’s under the tree that matters, it’s who is around it that’s really important.

That’s why we aim to do everything we can to give our guests a respite holiday to remember.

We give our guests the chance to take time away from the stresses of everyday life and to spend time doing what really matters: making memories with those they love.

Why not pledge to do something amazing for charity? In pledging via the Big Give to Revitalise your donation will be match funded and will make twice the impact.

To find out more about Revitalise visit www.revitalise.org.uk.

If you would like to support Revitalise via the Big Give visit: https://bit.ly/revbiggive.