| Topic: | Re:Air pollution in Putney | |
| Posted by: | Tim Henderson | |
| Date/Time: | 07/04/14 11:36:00 |
| The Sunday Times story this weekend on diesels and air pollution trailed the latest report due to come out of the Kings College group : "The new report is the third to recommend getting rid of diesels. The first two ended up in Defra’s archives with no action taken. In the first report, in 2011, Carslaw and his colleagues said: “We found that in diesel cars and light goods vehicles emissions of nitrogen dioxide have not decreased for the past 15–20 years.” For their second study in 2012 they used smog sensing camera traps, in which beams of infrared and ultraviolet light were shone across a busy road to analyze the exhaust plume of passing vehicles, simultaneously photographing their number plates, to measure emissions. The system showed that NO2 emissions for almost every type of diesel vehicle were several times higher than implied by the European Union test results. The latest study uses the same technology to look at buses and other large vehicles and is expected to draw similarly powerful conclusions." I suspect that this includes the long-awaited Putney High Street monitoring mentioned in http://ww3.wandsworth.gov.uk/moderngov/documents/s31158/Paper%20No.%2014-148.pdf "27. An in-depth study is now being undertaken using ANPR cameras and automatic monitoring in the High Street (funded via Defra Air Quality Grants in 2011/12 and 2012/13). This study will assess the impact of the changes to the bus fleet and other air quality measures on ambient concentrations. The results of this study are expected in April 2014." It looks to me as if the bus improvement benefits may have now levelled off with the moving annual average at the Putney monitor settling down to around 120 ug/m3. (It was higher at 160ug/m3 for several years) At least the reduction has meant that Oxford Street is now given the ignominy of the highest long-term concentration in England ! |