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the news that motor giant Porsche is taking legal action against Ken Livingstone
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You're delighted a foreign corporation is threatening to thwart the will of a democratically elected British politician? Interesting...*takes note*. By the way, all four main candidates support keeping the charge, although Boris wants to look at removing it from Kensington, where coincidentally a lot of people vote Tory and a lot of his mates live.
Actually this is something of a press stunt by Porsche, since the £25 proposal is clearly subject to the outcome of the Mayoral election (a point made by his office) and Porsche are not actually taking legal action, merely writing a snotty letter threatening it. I'd like to see their case, which seems to be a) the increase will have a limited effect on CO2 and b) it's going to be bad for our customers and thus (implied) our profits.
There an interesting point here though - if they do win based on what they say they're arguing about (that the change won't have sufficient effect on emissions) does that mean we can all sue the Government for policies that aren't as green as they could be. The Heathrow Third Runway, perhaps, or new road schemes? Gordon Brown's trips to China? The National ID computer? New coal-fired power stations? Zero fuel tax on airlines?
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we have some major companies ie, Harrods, John Lewis, Bentalls, and Hamleys,
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Harrods is a tourist trap run by a nutter, Hamleys is rather expensive but next to Oxford Circus tube station in an area with near zero parking. Bentalls is in Kingston, miles outside the CC area, with a large car park in a town centre substantially disfigured by new roads. There's also a John Lewis in the same area. I'm not sure what your point is, Arthur, picking stores (evidently near where you live) that were designed back in the car-greedy 1980s to be easily reachable by road, thus adding to traffic and pollution?
That's what we're trying to move away from. For instance, the gigantic Westfield development at Shepherd's Bush will have two new stations and a totally refurbished Tube station sandwiching it (and 4500 parking spaces, but hey, 570
cycle bays. Bluewater has 13,000 car spaces, by the way, and is only slightly larger). It would have had a tram too, which was a 2004 manifesto commitment by Livingstone, but it was killed by the Tory councils along the Uxbridge Road. So much for Green Dave Cameron.
Cars aren't needed in central London, large gas-guzzling ones even less so. The CC has won awards and clearly works in shifting people from car to public transport and making the latter more efficient.