red ken, bbc, 4x4.

Their website article seems pretty good, certainly far better than past ones;

The only reference to 4x4s is by Ken himself and reads thusly;

"Nobody needs to damage the environment by driving a gas-guzzling Chelsea tractor in central London," Mr Livingstone said. "The CO2 emissions from the most high-powered 4x4s and sports cars can be up to four times as great as the least polluting cars."

Entirely typical, as is his confusion of the LEZ and the "Congestion charge", which should now be renamed the "whatever Ken thinks it should be" charge.

If he was really interested in congestion or pollution, I'd have thought he'd try and put a scheme in place that costs for the miles driven in the zone, rather than the current situation where driving into then out of the zone in the space of 10 seconds costs the same as driving into it and driving around in it for a whole week. There'd be no practical way to measure the miles a car has driven accurately of course, other than by having many more cameras pointed everywhere but Londoners seem to like that kind of thing.

Is that right ... once you're in 'the ring' then you don't pay anymore CC?

Seems a bit odd to me, but if it's right, we might have a venue for a week-long AFL unofficial meet ... see if there are any green-lanes within the CC boundaries ... just so we can cover 'that Lundun town' with mud and s**te and gearbox oil ... ;)

I'll fire up memory Map tonight.

Unfortunately not. If your car moves within the zone during chargeable hours you have to pay for that day, there are cameras (fixed and moving) within the zone just for that purpose.

Yep, no expense once you're in there other than patience.

Har har, nothing but tarmac and a few parks!

Mind you in a recent Top Gear I noticed Clarkson driving around the BBC building, inside, even in the lifts, in a car, perhaps we could try that? I've been told the area around it is pretty bad though, so don't stop moving until you hit the lobby or you'll lose your wheels.

Hmm, you're right, but you do only have to pay once per day from the look of it. From my experience calling the CC zone staff, they don't know the rules either ;-)

It's charged once a day, if you drive past a camera. If you just park up, you can stay there for ever without paying it again, as long as you're within the parking restrictions, as far as I can tell. Move your car, & you pay it. The problem is, the cameras are all over the place, not just at the entry points, & they have mobile cameras that they park at random. I could be wrong, of course, but that's what I remember from when I last checked.

The only BOAT or RUPP I ever found in the Greater London area was one near the Hanger Lane gyratory system, & that had street lights on it. Off Hillcrest Road, London W5, IIRC.

That's old information though, from before I moved away a decade or so ago.

Hmmm ... so we'll make it a meet for a day, after first visiting a nearby (Devils Pit maybe) mud-hole ... ;)

Be interesting to see what hte green meanies would say if a troop of Landrovers turned up with real mud on them.

Do ANPR/CC cameras 'see' through mud splatters? ... ;)

Excluding the Royal Parks lol, the best place to play in the mud would be Little Scrubs on the west side of Scrubs Lane:

Technically this is yards outside the cc zone but one could spin up and flick mud across the road into enemy territory :)

The area around Telly Centre and the offices at White City Media Village are dire, you really wouldn't want to walk about there after nightfall, believe me, I work night shifts there and have to! Unfortunately I think the parts of the Top Gear program where Clarkson drove the bubble car inside were staged, the buildings are riddled with smoke detectors and can you imagine what a 2 stroke engine would do to the atmosphere inside a building, let alone a small lift?!! Telly Centre is outside the CC zone by the way too, thankfully. Though the new higher charge for catagory G vehicles would only apply to a vehicle registered from year 2006, so doesn't include my 2004 registered TD5 Disco, which by the way, officially chucks out 436 grammes of CO2 per km, over twice the amount to have been included in cat G if were made in 2006. Even though the car is a 7 seater amd gives better fuel economy than my wifes VW Jetta.....

Alan C

CC to Ofcom, I think it is Ofcom who deals with compliants about TV/Radio matters. The Press Compliants Commission being for the printed media.

Got to admit is peed me off when I heard it in of one the Radio 4 news bulletins this afternoon.

WTF the BBC is Poacher and Game keeper!

"However, we cannot consider complaints about accuracy in BBC TV and radio news or complaints about impartiality in BBC TV and radio programmes. These complaints have to be dealt with by the BBC."

Now typing my complaint into the BBC's online system...

Where do you get that figure from? I'd like to know the 'official' numbers for my own TD5 Disco ('01) which probably isn't a mile different to your own. Bet the wagon is worse tho - '92 110 CSW 200Tdi!

You sure? Checks the V5 of my 2001 TD5 and that states:

"V.7 CO2 (g/km) 262 G/KM"

Oh! I'm sure I was reading the correct figure from my V5, I'll double check when I get in tonight. Did think it was rather high.

Alan C

My oops! I stated the CO, carbon monoxide output, and wrongly too! The CO output is 0.436 g/km, but the more important figure for CO2 is as Dave stated earlier as 262 g/km. This would still put it very well into band G as it's over 225 g/km, but since this band only came in in March 06 it remains in band F and not effected by Ken's higher charge. Just as a curiosity, I looked up the exhaust emission for the newer Discovery 3 TDV6 manual, this is stated to be 244 g/km with an economy figure of 30.7 mpg.

Sorry about that wrong figure!

Alan C

Buy a foreign registered vehicle and drive through London with impunity, thats what we did last year, it was very pleasant, great for tourists. Must be absoloutely crap for the residents that the mayor is supposed to represent.

BTW this news item made Australia's Radio National and was promoting "Mr Livingstone I presume" as an enviromental leader and that London would be light years ahead in the anti vehicle movement with 300 miles of bikeways,

6000 rental bikes and improved public transport all being paid for by the charges. I intend reporting him as a potential terrorist so that if he makes a visa application to visit Australia it will be refused, you lot can keep his eccentric ideas all to yourselves!!! FFS vote him out.

The problem with Red Ken is that he's hugely popular.

That's because he latches onto a 'problem' that nobody else has noticed, that doesn't actually bother anyone much, but makes everyone feel good if something is done.

The lady taking six kids to an expensive private school in a huge Japanese

4x4 in London isn't voting for him, and the vast majority of Londoners vaguely resent the rich thundering about in such vehicles anyway.

He can't loose.

And we just get caught in the backlash.

Not that I'd take the Landy to London anyway. The public transport, compared to North Yorkshire anyway, is plentiful and cheap, parking is horrendously difficult and expensive and I hate driving in large cities.

Plus Londoners aren't terribly attuned to the idea that the drivers of elderly Land Rover are accustomed to people getting out of their way because they don't care about the odd ding in the paintwork...

Unless you're anti-social enough to be a car enthusiast.

Hmm. I know a government like that.

Which is one of the big problems with this country. If you own something nice, people don't aspire to own their version. They hate you instead. It's easier for them, and laziness is the preferred option in the UK nowadays.

Lose.

London is about the only city in the UK where I don't mind the public transport, mainly because it is regular and pretty reliable.

That's because they don't look at old Land Rovers. They're too busy dreaming of shit like BMW X5s.

This country has no-one who stands up for the motorist, the AA / RAC etc are more interested in selling house insurance and credit cards. "Safe Speed" are only interested in speed cameras and Brunstrom and do themselves more harm than good. The ABD seem to have their heads up their own arses, the media seem to be 99% brainwashed about the whole "eco-friendly" thing and there are no signs of anything changing.

2 years and I'm out of the UK for good. Can't wait!

Well I spend three months a year outside the UK now.

You'll find it's nice to come back to somewhere where the services work all the time, and when they don't someone comes around and fixes them.

It's also nice to live in a place where if you see a cop with a gun you know it's time to be somewhere else...

I don't think it's so much that those against 4x4s want one, they're cheap after all, more that people don't really think particularly hard about environmental issues, they just think they do. Paper bags are as bad for the environment as plastic bags for example as they're so expensive to make, and a new Toyota Prius is massively more environmentally damaging than the car you already have, no matter what it is, for the same reason. It's far easier to just hate someone else and blame them.

How's this for one of the dumbest articles about Ken "I'm not at all corrupt" Livingstone, the congestion charge and 4x4s, freshly laid today;

While people might moan about the BBC and the Guardian, you rarely see such twaddle as the above in them. Reminds me why I don't bother with the newspapers much. And then there's the comments!