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London's Deputy Mayor On Ditching Diesel
dkatana writes: During an interview in Barcelona last week, at the Smart Cities Congress, London's Deputy Mayor Matthew Pencharz said that he doesn't believe diesel cars belong in cities. He said, "I don't believe that for the urban setting, for light vehicles, diesel is the right thing," He added, "I don't think it is the right thing if you are an urban driver, stopping-starting in traffic all day, not going very far, not zipping along at 50 mph on the motorway. [I think] diesel is not the right technology." He also blamed the European Commission for being too lenient with emission standards and conformity factors. "The conformity factors the Commission [has recently approved] are not as good as we would like, clearly, because we are going to have the same problem again," he said. "The VW scandal has focused attention on a problem we hardly knew about, and it has raised to the top the public policy of failure of dieselization across the European Union, and the UK too, combined with the spectacular failure of the Euro engine standards," he said. "[The scandal] has focused our minds on the fact that we need to accelerate the way out of diesel."
urban driver, stopping-starting in traffic all day, not going very far
Kinda the sweet spot for hybrid-electric drives, no?
Someone had to do it.
Diesel engines take shitton of time to warm up because they are efficient. And during the warm up they emit shitton of PM. Then the efficiency of an engine doesn't mean it is clean. While it's true for CO2 it is NOT for NOx. It's actually a trade off: either you're efficient and have low mpg but produce lots of NOx, or you run LESS efficient but produce less NOx and more CO2. Gasoline engine doesn't have this problem because they're not running at an over lean mixture (lambda>>1).
What does that mean, kind of like trains. You mean steam locomotives? Here's a hint - steam locomotives weren't powered by steam, they were powered by coal. Kinda like saying I'm driving a piston-driven car.
You have to understand that it is a politician speaking. they open their mouth and out comes random sounds that make good sound bites but often have no bearing on real facts.
That being said, he is half correct in that diesel vehicles should not really be driving in most city centers, the other half is that petrol vehicles should not either.
The distances in such are so short that fully electric or plug in hybrids that will mostly run on electricity in such places are a much better solution.
Further really in tightly built places like London public transportation should be built to cover most travel needs.
That's because diesels don't produce Carbon Monoxide, the famous odorless, colourless poison that can build up in confined spaces. But diesels do produce high levels of nitrogen oxides and soot particulates, which while smog-causing do not immediately kill a person unless there is enough of them that they displace all the oxygen.
Diesel emissions can be cleaned up though, and we already have the technology to to it: Urea. This allows the engine to be run very lean, burning the fuel as completely as possible and cutting down on soot and unburned hydrocarbon emissions, but producing large amounts of NOx which the urea then takes care of, turning it back into nitrogen gas and water vapour. And it's a proven technology, all new diesel pickups and tractor trailers this side of the Atlantic have it now, and it's not a huge hassle; a friend recently purchased a Dodge Ram 1500 EcoDiesel (3.0L V6) and he has to refill the urea tank every 10,000 km, or about every second oil change. It really cleans the thing up, I could stand behind the thing and deeply breathe in the exhaust with only a slightly sweet chemical hint to tell me it wasn't straight air.
Ahhhh, desperately trying to denigrate diesel in favour of petrol in the face of a rapidly falling oil price. Good luck with that.
If you got the damn bikes of the road, the diesel vehicles would pollute far less.
And, as for public transport - sure, take your desktop computer, server or laser printer (or even your weekly supermarket shopping) under your arm on London transport in the rush hour. You can post the video on Youtube afterwards.
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In the UK anyway.
And diesel IS a filthy fuel. Even most new cars don't meet the limits set outside the test lab and once the car is 2nd or 3rd hand and isn't being maintained properly or if its a van thats been thrashed all its life it'll start belching black shit out of its exhaust on acceleration (which is barely tested in the MOT). I see these vehicles every day on the road.
Petrol is heavily, heavily subsidised in the UK. It is simply a more expensive fuel to refine and more of it needs to be transported when compared with diesel. More petrol gets used, hence more of it is transported. Simple.
There are many explanations for petrol being less expensive than diesel on the UK. None add up. As the oil price falls that puts ever greater pressure on the fuel that is most costly to produce. No surprise that in the UK a lot of disdain has been thrown diesel's way, along with the notion that the pumps could run dry. Laughable.
As for diesel being a filthy fuel, I'm afraid petrol is as well. More so than many realise. Modern petrol engines pump out a great deal more NOx than before due to trying, vainly, to keep up with diesel's efficiency. Also, less diesel per volume needs to be transported which is a factor most don't even consider. Petrol is dead. The next stage beyond diesel are all electric vehicles. Hybrids are hideously expensive to build and maintain.
In London, bicycles effectively use about 2MPG of diesel by slowing large numbers of buses and trucks to the position where they are unable to get out of low gear. They are one of the biggest causes of pollution from diesel.
If you got the damn bikes of the road, the diesel vehicles would pollute far less.
Yeah. Damn those bikes. We'll ignore the effect of the pedestrians, lights, junctions, general congestion and all the other factors that contribute to stop/start traffic.
And, as for public transport - sure, take your desktop computer, server or laser printer (or even your weekly supermarket shopping) under your arm on London transport in the rush hour. You can post the video on Youtube afterwards.
You know, the number of times I've taken my desktop computer to work, along with my weekly shopping, makes me glad my town barely has public transport. It would be a daily grind for me to lug all that around.
And I can testify that most of the single occupancy cars blocking the roads have a similarly burdensome commuter load.
Now, that's just silly. You usually don't buy a new PC and printer any more frequently than it is justifiable to rent a car for the occasion, if you can't just simply have it delivered to your doorstep.
We already have! It was a solved problem ages ago. When my parents were young, every respectable grocery store had some kid to do errands for them, including making deliveries to people who couldn't get to the store themselves. And if you care to take a more hands on approach, or maybe feet on, as it were - have you ever heard of a bicycle trolley? Methinks much of your protests stems from a comfortability standpoint, not from what's actually possible.
Yes, but you would still have to come up with a method for people to move large packages around if you eliminated all the cars.
You'd still have cabs and delivery vans in London.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
The problem with diesel engines is that to make them just as clean as gasoline engines, they require a combination of diesel particulate filters and a selective catalytic reduction (SCR) system to make it easier to remove NOx gases--the combination of the two is NOT cheap, as anyone notes from a US-legal Mercedes-Benz or BMW turbodiesel car. And how well will those systems stand up to the type of demanding usage on a taxicab with its heavy stop and go driving.
I wonder why London Mayor Boris Johnson didn't announce a plan as far back as 2010 to phase out the use of diesel engines on London taxicabs and buses in favor of using compressed natural gas (CNG). Here in the USA, many cities are now mandating buses and taxicabs switch to CNG, and in Asia, CNG have been used for buses and taxicabs for many years.