Marple Community Forum & Noticeboard

And all the while, NoX emissions from vehicles is falling (despite there being more of them),
Euro standard   Date   NOx
Euro 3           January 2001           0.5
Euro 4           January 2006           0.25
Euro 5a           September 2011   0.18
Euro 6           September 2015   0.08
Since 2015, a Euro6 diesel produces less than a 5th of the NoX as a Euro3 and around half of that of  Euro5A from 2011. The number of vehicles hasn't increased by the same levels and therefore over time, the situation will ammeliorate. It's almost that the clock is ticking and governement have to get this new taxation introduced before the older vehicles all go to the scrapper and the case for ULEZ is gone. Rest assured, even if we were to all move to electric vehicles, you'll be taxed on those at some point!
You can chose a statistic to back any argument it seems.

How can I look foolish, when I've ignored the last two years data on purpose that COVID has reduced vehicle usage!.

What on earth are you going on about?

As I've pointed out, 2019 / 2020 AQ and traffic information is unrepresentative of everything that went before the Pandemic. Because traffic levels during the last 2 years were artificially low due to Covid. Thats why all of the AQ monitoring stations are showing lower levels for 2020. Thats just a matter of fact. Argue with it if you want, but you just look foolish.

AQ station 7 is located right in the middle of Hazel Grove town centre on the N-S A6 corridor - why would that be affected by construction of an E-W link road 2 or 3 miles away? 

Well the Marple sensor, ie the one we as a website I would hope, would be interested in shows little change pre covid.

It’s around the 29 mark, which the limit they set was 40.
Having looked at a number of the results and ignoring the covid years, they all show a marked reduction without Andy’s let’s wring the motorists yet again scheme!.

You can’t blame covid for everything and I include the council using such excuses for saying leisure centres, library’s have seen a reduction in usage. It’s a bit like proclaiming we’ve not been buying travel money as much either!.

Of course we can blame covid for a huge reduction in car journeys in 2019 and 2020 - its an absolute proven fact. Indeed, so much so that in my job I'm not allowed to freely use traffic data collected during these key times, due to concerns with it being unrepresentative of what precdeded the pandemic. Its a nonsense to suggest otherwise.

So what if Marple is below the threshold for potentially harmful air quality - lucky us, we thankfully live in a relatively quiet suburb / town, on the edge of the green lung of the Peak District. But we don't just drive our cars around Marple, we do like to travel further afield, be it to work, shop, leisure, etc. So unlucky Hazel Grove, Bredbury, Offerton etc and large parts of the rest of GM, where our cars often pass through, and where AQ has been an issue for years, until the pandemic cut vehicle movements (for the moment).

There are actually very few monitoring stations in Stockport that provide long term data, but if we look at two that are on routes that are likley to accept significant quantities of Marple derived traffic (e.g. A6 and A626), this shows that: on the A6 through Hazel Grove, one of the AQ stations (site 7) has shown values above theshold all through the 2010's up until 2019 / 2020, whereupon it dropped by 40+% - can anyone think why? At the station at the end of A626 Offerton Road / Marple Rd just before the Stockport inner relief road, there appears to be only data for the last 2 years. This shows AQ levels at close to threshold in 2019 which would have been impacted by the pandemic and a drop in 2020. Who know's where levels were before 2019 and covid, but it would be a good guess that they were higher, based on data from other sites.

I'm not saying the current ULEZ scheme is the answer, but vehicle emission related AQ issues are definitely real in GM and it doesn't help the debate to pretend that recorded values in the last 2 years are in any way representative of typical traffic levels and that there isn't a problem, just because Marple is 'ok'.

looking at https://cleanairgm.com/data-hub/diffusion-tubes and pulling some data for analysis, out of a network of 400 passive diffusion tubes, only TWO, yes two, identify as not meeting targets, Tameside 55 and Wigan 180. there is no problem to fix!

That's because, thanks to Covid, traffic levels at these locations have all dropped by a substantial level - look at all of the monitoring graphs for a wide range of locations all over GM. This means that a huge amount of locations that were above target levels are currently below - but we all know that this is temporary.

So what do we learn from that. Fewer vehicle trips = better air quality. Can't think why they are looking to implement a clean air initiative that focuses on vehicle trips?