Car hatred won’t cut down pollution

NEWCASTLE City Council is implementing rules that erode our freedoms; it is now going to close roads near to schools using congestion and pollution as a justification (The Journal, March 27).

Worse still, it’s taking valuable police time away from fighting crime and redirecting it to enforcing its new eco-rules. This may be a pilot but these pilots tend to be self-fulfilling prophecies especially given the previous antics of the current council against the motorist.

As a parent living in Gosforth, this would have impacted our family had not our youngest moved recently up to secondary from one of the impacted schools. I enjoyed taking him to school on my way to work and to be honest we would likely have gone to a different school had this pilot come to pass.

The policy is being driven by a certain class of sanctimonious politician who use hatred of the car as a totem around which they can prove their love of the environment, their commitment to tackling climate change, and where they stand as a so-called progressive in Britain’s political class system.

If you dig deeper, you find the policies they pursue conflict with the objectives they regularly opine. For example, they say they are concerned about the income of working families, but to make ends meet most families need to have two parents working. The result is a hectic morning routine and using the car for school drops speeds things up and ensures a safe transfer for children. The decision makers were also among the strongest proponents of harsh COVID lockdowns which discouraged public transport use and impacted different sectors of society disproportionately.

Increasingly, cars runs on electric only, in the city and on the school run. New government legislation is phasing out petrol and diesel cars, and EU rules have made modern petrols and diesels much cleaner from an air pollution standpoint. The City Council would be far better off pursuing policies which acknowledge the technological advancement of current vehicles – does any “green” politician even know what ad-blu is? In my working life I also run one of the North East’s fastest growing firms – it happens to be one of the UK’s largest car dealership groups. We are striving to provide the public with the least polluting, most cost-effective and safest vehicle transport there is. Newcastle Council is engaging in gesture politics that will inconvenience many but, as the march of electric vehicles continues, result in very little difference to pollution. Robert Forrester, Gosforth