Twentieth report : transport and the environment--developments since 1994 / Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution ; presented to Parliament by Command of Her Majesty, September 1997.

  • Great Britain. Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution.
Date:
1997
Catalogue details

Licence: Open Government Licence

Credit: Twentieth report : transport and the environment--developments since 1994 / Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution ; presented to Parliament by Command of Her Majesty, September 1997. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    inspection and maintenance checks; manufacturers liability for the performance of emission control systems extended from 80,000 km to 160,000 km; electronic sensors installed on the vehicle to monitor the performance of the emission control systems (on-board diagnostics); recall procedures whereby models can be recalled and refitted if their emission performance deteriorates beyond an acceptable level; improved mechanisms for the remote roadside detection of vehicles emitting above acceptable levels. D.11 The measures looked at in the last area of analysis (local technical and non-technical options) included both local measures (traffic bans, speed regulation, cheaper public transport, alternative fuels), certain non-fiscal economic instruments (road pricing, scrappage subsidies) and the use of fuel taxes, vehicle purchase taxes and annual vehicle circulation taxes to influence transport users. In the final analysis, road pricing, traffic bans, the subsidy of public transport, scrappage subsidies and the conversion of urban buses to alternative fuels were included. The quantification of the costs and benefits of these local and non-technical measures entailed considerable uncertainties, not least because the response of transport users to the various measures proposed could not be predicted exactly. D.12 Touche Ross collected data on the costs of the individual measures and combined this with information on their emissions impact. These were used as the input data for TransOpt, an optimisation model developed in the Programme, to identify the least-cost packages of measures to meet the emissions reduction targets. This aimed to provide policy-makers with an objective assessment of possible measures that could be adopted within the road transport sector to achieve higher air quality standards. D.13_ Several parameters were adopted to ensure that the potential contribution of each type of measure identified above was assessed on a consistent and comparable basis. These parameters covered: the time-scale for implementation of the measures examined in the study sectoral and geographical coverage categorisation and treatment of costs for each measure the methods by which costs were converted to a common basis the methods by which the effects of each measure on emissions were estimated. D.14 The analysis took as a baseline measures already agreed, ie 1996 standards for cars and heavy duty vehicles. Manufacturers were asked to identify the technology that would be used to meet specific emission reduction limits from the 1996 baseline. The study thus focused on measures which were considered to be technically capable of introduction by the year 2000 and would therefore be likely to have a significant impact on reducing pollutant emissions by the year 2010. The measures considered were based on established and proven technologies; manufacturers did not put forward technological measures such as de-NO, catalysts and particulate traps. D.15 The objective of the analysis was to identify the most cost-effective series of interlocking measures in order to achieve the desired emission reductions (D.7—D.8) at the least cost for the Community as a whole. The intention was that a certain proportion of the background levels of pollution would be removed by EU-wide technical measures and, as and where appropriate, these technical measures would be supplemented by national and/or local measures in those localities with elevated levels of pollution. D.16 ACEA considered that the focus on the target year 2010 introduced bias into the -cost- effectiveness analysis. An alternative approach, ‘emission discounting’, which targeted the years between 2000 and 2010, would have given greater emphasis to measures having an immediate impact on emissions, such as changes in fuel quality, while targeting the year 2010 alone tended to bias the results towards measures having a longer-term impact related to the turnover of the vehicle fleet. Europia denied that it escaped lightly because of the nature of the analysis used, arguing that refiners must meet ‘mainly up-front capital costs’ which are harder to recover than the increased operating costs facing car manufacturers and described the European Commission’s proposals as a package of