A company charged with making London’s West End the world’s top shopping destination is aiming to transform the area into a greener, less polluted shopping locale by reducing the number of buses operating there.
New West End Company (NWEC), established in 2005 by London businesses, is working with Transport for London and Westminster City Council to find ways to cut
carbon emissions by reducing
buses and traffic in the West End.
Hundreds of buses operate in the West End, but many are running almost empty of passengers, said chairman of NWEC, Dame Judith Mayhew Jonas, who was speaking at a business sustainability event in London today. The bus-cutting initiative would help to address the area’s air quality,
reduce emissions in the area and make the West End a generally more pleasant place for the residents, consumers, employees and business owners that spend time there, she said.
"Some 280 buses travel up and down Oxford Street every hour," Jonas told delegates at the BaseLondon conference. "Outside commuter hours, in the hours which are prime shopping hours between 10:00 am and 4:00 pm, most of them have only got 10 per cent capacity use […]Their emissions often exceed EU air quality standards, which the UK has signed up to abide by, from 2012. So our major sustainability and carbon reduction challenge is to reduce these bus numbers."
Carbon studyAccording to Jonas, King’s College London conducted a study during one of the area’s Traffic-Free Shopping Days and found that, in the absence of traffic, harmful PM10 pollutants were reduced by 63 per cent and black carbon was reduced by 76 per cent compared to a normal day.
"So it’s clear that reducing the amount of traffic in the West End will be a major contribution to carbon reduction in the area," Jonas said.
Visitor growthJonas cited reducing the number of buses and amount of traffic in the area as a method of safely managing growth, as the number of visitors – currently numbering at 200 million per year – is only expected to increase. The opening of Crossrail in 2018 will bring an additional 70 million journeys to the West End per year, Jonas said.
As these visitors contribute a vast sum of money to London’s economy, Jonas cited maintaining the area’s growth and atmosphere as vital not only to the economies of London and the UK as a whole, but as a means of generating revenue that could be invested in
green technologies.
New green busesAlso addressing the BaseLondon conference was the capital’s Mayor Boris Johnson, who said new green buses would be operating on London’s roads by the end of this year that would boast carbon emissions 40 per cent lower than those of current diesel buses and 15 per cent lower than hybrid buses.
Meanwhile, the Mayor wants London to become the 'electric car capital of Europe’. To this end, last month saw the launch of Source London, a scheme that will create 1,300 public electric vehicle charge points iin the city. Plans for every new taxi in London to have zero tailpipe emissions by 2020 have also been drawn up, and the Metropolitan Police Service is considering the use of green motorbikes, Johnson said.
According to Johnson, Crossrail will increase the capacity of London’s rail network by 10 per cent and tube upgrades alone will increase it by 30 per cent. Additionally, bicycles are being used more frequently in London thanks to the Barclays Cycle hire system.
"We’re going into a near Victorian age in investment in mass transit," Johnson said. "I really think that in 15 to 20 years time, vehicular emissions in London will be as distant a memory as the pea soup fogs of the 1950s."
The Mayor wants to reduce London’s greenhouse gas emissions by 60 per cent over the next 20 years.
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