This is an idea from my London days, those who are familiar with London will know that there is a congestion zone covering most of central London where cars have to pay to enter ( it used to be 8 quid a day but that may have gone up with the impending olympics )
If however you owned an electric/hybrid you were exempt from the congestion charge – neat eh? In fact a friend of mine bought a Mr.Bean style 2 person electric car for zipping between his workshop in Vauxhall and shop in the city.
Naturally setting up the infrastructure required to implement congestion zone charging is well – somewhat expensive I would imagine.
However one thing the City of Yarra could consider, which would be very cheap to implement, well free to implement – but there is obviously some possible loss of parking revenue – is to offer
FREE PARKING FOR HYBRIDS within the CoY
Free parking for Hybrid Cars
This is an idea from my London days, those who are familiar with London will know that there is a congestion zone covering most of central London where cars have to pay to enter ( it used to be 8 quid a day but that may have gone up with the impending olympics )
If however you owned an electric/hybrid you were exempt from the congestion charge – neat eh? In fact a friend of mine bought a Mr.Bean style 2 person electric car for zipping between his workshop in Vauxhall and shop in the city.
Naturally setting up the infrastructure required to implement congestion zone charging is well – somewhat expensive I would imagine.
However one thing the City of Yarra could consider, which would be very cheap to implement, well free to implement – but there is obviously some possible loss of parking revenue – is to offer
FREE PARKING FOR HYBRIDS within the CoY
Toll roads provide the infrastructure for automatic billing against usage. Toll tag sensors on the edge of the congestion charge area would do it. Since billing rate is different for different vehicle types then differentiation on the basis of greenhouse impact is conceptually simple. Problem: This whole argument does not deal with the reason for having congestion charges and costed parking in the first place.
I saw this article today: http://theage.drive.com.au/motor-news/government-called-to-tax-electric-cars-20110609-1fupr.html
…and this was one of the comments: “Our electricity base load generation comes from large coal and they don’t get shut off at night, they only get throttled back so they use more cooling water. It turns out that if the power companies could control the time that cars are recharged, we could replace more than 10% of the cars on the road with electric and not burn any more coal except on the hottest and coldest days of the year.”
Interesting.
Totally dumb idea. Why? * Ford Fiesta econetic (not a hybrid): CO2 g/km combined – 98 g/km * Lexus LS600hL (a hybrid): CO2 g/km combined – 219 g/km
Source: http://www.greenvehicleguide.gov.au/GVGPublicUI/Home.aspx
Fair point, maybe the benchmark would be “low emission vehicles” not sure how this would be measured though