While the Clean Air Zone (CAZ) aims to address the city's long-standing issue of toxic air, it fails to address the daily needs of locals who live, work, and breathe in the city.
Bristol was rated as one of the five areas in the UK with illegal levels of air pollution In 2020, leading to the need for reforms in the city's clean air policies. Yet questions remain as to whether Bristol’s recent launch of its Clean Air Zone (CAZ) is truly enough to meet the needs for greener city planning.
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Bristol City Council reported that air pollution causes around 300 premature deaths annually in the city, attributed to exposure to NO2 and fine particulate matter. Asthma, heart attacks, and strokes have been identified as health problems typically associated with toxic air.
While plans aim to reduce the amount of cars on the road, campaigners argue that further changes are required not only to meet Bristol’s sustainability goals of carbon neutral by 2030, but also to enhance the lives of those who live and breathe in the city on a daily basis.
Critised
Geoff Allan is a member of Bristol Clean Air Alliance (BCAA), an alliance of concerned individuals and local groups campaigning on the issue of Bristol's polluted air.
He told The Ecologist: “As an individual pedestrian and cyclist, the most offensive experience for me is when a diesel vehicle goes past, leaving a trail of rank poisonous filth that you are left to breathe in. This remains the normal everyday experience for pedestrians using Bristol’s roads.
“Until most vehicles are electric, the current level of death and respiratory damage will carry on as normal. The Royal College of Physicians estimated in a 2016 report that air pollution causes an excess death toll of 40,000 people annually in the UK, yet the issue remains of little political interest.”
In order to help manage Bristol’s toxic air problem, the government initiative Bristol Clean Air Zone (CAZ) was launched in 2022. The project was heavily critised as being discriminatory towards communters who don’t have the financial means to pay the city’s pollution charges of £9 per day when travelling through clean air zones.
Affordability
Mike Birkin, a supporter of Bristol Friends of the Earth (BFOE) of over thirty years, suggested that “the CAZ as designed has the effect of pitting one form of disadvantage – unaffordability of transport – against another: polluted air. And often it is the same people suffering both.”
In some locations in Bristol annual mean concentrations exceed 60ugm, according to Clean Air for Bristol. A network of 100 sites that measure nitrogen dioxide are published on an open data platform, available here.
While the Clean Air Zone (CAZ) aims to address the city's long-standing issue of toxic air, it fails to address the daily needs of locals who live, work, and breathe in the city.
Data suggests that pollution levels exceed legal limits on numerous city streets outside the Clean Air Zone, with multiple streets in Bedminster and other areas recorded to have harmful levels of nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter.
Bath has successfully demonstrated the effectiveness of Clean Air Zones, as the annual mean concentration of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) in the urban area outside the zone decreased by 22 per cent in 2021 compared to 2019.
Non-compliance
While CAZ has been effective in reducing air pollution within some trials, Birkin emphasises that such schemes are not responsible for improving the quality of life of those living in cities, but rather for keeping pollution levels within legal limits.
Birkin continued: “It’s a real problem that the CAZ is not part of an integrated approach but is so narrowly focused on achieving the one objective - basically to get the UK government off the hook of non-compliance”.
”It’s true that active travel options have been expanded in the city but not nearly as much as is needed. Compare Bristol as a city to one such as Copenhagen, Oslo or even Paris or where active transformation of the city has sucessfully reduced the number of cars.
“Another important factor is the declining reliability of public transport in the city. If there was a truly reliable and efficient public transport service such as can be found in a city like Nottingham people would use it."
Livable
Radical transformation of city planning has been demonstrated by concepts such as the 15-minute city, with Oxford being one of the first cities in the UK to explore the urban planning model.
This would involve re-shifting city planning in a way that would enable local citizens living within the zone to access their daily needs; such as work, healthcare and shopping within a 15-minute walk or cycle from their homes with the aim of creating sustainable and livable ‘urban villages’.
Professor Herbert Girardet adopts a global view of the future of the city in The Metabolism of Modern Cities. He asks “can we find ways of curbing their enormous appetite for energy, food, timber and consumer goods, and their astonishing discharge of gaseous, liquid and solid wastes?”
Promises
While such drastic concepts are often slow to be implemented, Bristol Clean Air Alliance suggest that adopting such approaches, where cars are not permitted into the city centre, would be an opportunity to enhance public transport options. Such schemes would require businesses to hire e-cargo bikes and electric vans for delivery.
Bristol’s ambitious City Leap project aims to invest nearly £500 million into low carbon energy infrastructure to meet the target of becoming carbon neutral by 2030.
Alongside a number of proposals to the city’s energy system, the project also aims to improve the city's transport system, with a focus on promoting electric vehicles and public transport by investing in charging infrastructure for electric vehicles and supporting the development of a zero-emission bus fleet.
Questions
Yet the validity of the project, funded by private multi-million off-shore investors, opens questions as to whether the iniative will deliver a strategy that is based on local needs. And whilst the project aims for a carbon neutral 2030, plans to reach such goals remain vague.
It's evident that Bristol's transportation system is in dire need of reform. While the Clean Air Zone (CAZ) aims to address the city's long-standing issue of toxic air, it fails to address the daily needs of locals who live, work, and breathe in the city.
Creating a greener transport system would enhance the quality of life but also create a vibrant and enjoyable living experience for its citizens. This could be a crucial step towards Bristol’s fossil fuel-free future.
This Author
Yasmin Dahnoun is assistant editor at The Ecologist. Join The Ecologist at the Cinema Climatic at the Paintworks in Briston on Saturday, 17 June 2023 where we will be showing The Oil Machine and Offshore. Tickets from £0 to £3.00p plus 50p booking fee are available now.
