Clean Air Zone 95,000 drivers are ‘caught’ in three-week camera test
ALMOST 100,000 drivers in and around Bristol have been warned they will have to pay a charge from next month if they drive into the city centre, the Post can reveal.
The drivers were all sent letters during the course of last week after triggering new cameras installed at the entrances to the soon-to-begin Clean Air Zone scheme during September.
Bristol City Council said approximately 95,000 letters had been sent out, advising drivers that their vehicles were too polluting to pass through the zone – which comes into force on November 28 – without incurring a charge.
The council tested the cameras and systems for three weeks during September, which means they ‘caught’ an average of more than 4,500 individual drivers every day making a journey in a vehicle that would soon be liable for a charge – albeit drivers who were making the trip knowing that it would not, yet, incur a daily charge or fine.
However, the council has explained that it sent only one letter per driver – and multiple trips into the zone by the same driver in the same vehicle did not trigger more than one letter – so it is extremely likely that thousands more trips would have been liable for the daily charge.
Those charges will see drivers of private petrol and diesel cars, taxis and vans, and trucks under 3.5 tonnes, who are liable, charged £9 for a day. Drivers of HGVs over 3.5 tonnes, buses and coaches will be charged £100 for a day.
The council did not provide a breakdown of which vehicles and charges the recipients of the guidance letters had been photographed driving into the CAZ, but if all the drivers had smaller vehicles liable for the £9 charge, it would have netted the council £285,000 a week if the scheme had been up and running.
If just ten per cent of the vehicles clocked on the new CAZ cameras had been the larger HGVs or coaches, then, had the scheme been operating, it would have netted the council more than £570,000 a week in CAZ charges. And that figure that could well be higher, given that drivers were sent the warning letter only once, even if they made multiple trips into the CAZ during the three-week test.
The idea behind the Clean Air Zone is that those polluting vehicles that are liable to pay the charges will not make the journey into the city centre zone after November 28, thus leading to cleaner air for areas from Temple Meads to the Cumberland Basin. Only time will tell how effective the zone is at reducing the number of polluting vehicles both inside the zone and on the roads around the outside of it, and how many daily charges are paid, and how many fines are dished out.
Meanwhile, the council has admitted that ‘a very small number’ of the 95,000 letters were sent in error, sometimes to people who lived hundreds of miles away and had never visited Bristol before, thanks to glitches in the way the new cameras and computer systems record number plates.
One driver on Merseyside said he was told by the council ‘many’ people had complained that they had received the letter in error.