Our company got stung by the Bath ULEZ.

We had to get a truck from our works in North Dorset up to Manchester. Our usual route is to go up to Bath on the A36, in towards the city centre to cross the river then out on the A4 to pick up the A46 to the motorway.

The truck is a 7.5 tonne Euro 5 Mercedes.

Coming from the south it's the most viable route to the motorway network.

Our truck went through at 4.30 am and we received a ticket through demanding £100 for the ULEZ charge and threatening a £120.00 penalty.

It now looks like we will have to got through Bradford on Avon town centre or divert about 30 miles to go up through Chippenham to join the M4 or Bristol to run across to the M5. (Bristol's ULEZ comes live in October so this route will be scuppered.)

Whichever route just exports the pollution to another town. The local papers are full of stories of trucks using unsuitable residential rat runs to avoid the toll.

It appears the council haven't adequately signposted alternative routes for trucks so many others will be trapped in to their charging zone.

This means that Birmingham will miss out on 12 x hotel costs, 16 x dinners , drinks and nights out, 16 x car park costs etc. once a month.

Train not an option?

Often not a viable one, either in terms of cost or travel time. I just looked up what it would cost me for a weekday rush-hour trip:

Train: 3hr trip with two train changes (depart 5am, arrive 50 mins early [the next one arrives 10mins late] at 8.10am), cost £82, then either taxi/bus or walk to destination.

Car: 1hr 40mins - 2hrs 20mins but can leave whenever I like (same destination on Google Maps), petrol cost £31. Guess at parking cost (if none at destination office available): £10. Plus likely short walk to destination.

Half the price to go by car and probably an hour less travel time and avoiding the issue of missed connections. Admitedly my journey is more 'across country' and the difference might be less going from one well-connected city to another (I'd rarely consider driving into London, for example, as the cost and/or time/hassle would be far greater, even without the congestion charge).

One of the problems being away from London is often poor travel connections for East-West routes north of London and North-South ones in the South and South West of England. It's bad enough with the roads, but in my experience, public transport (especially trains) are far worse, because they are all London'centric in how they are arranged and prioritised.

Where I live (in Herfordshire), we have VERY poor Eas-West road and rail/bus connections (rail by far the worst) in comparison to North-South (which go to London). This mean it takes me just as long to travel to the other side of the county as it does to go to London and back during the rush hour by public transport.

Making Birmingham a ULEZ may look good (as well as, on the surface, being financially lucrative, like that in London when it and the Congestion Charge began), but eventually it starts to put people off enough to avoid the place entirely. I know a lot of people who hated living and/or working in London, and the pandemic just gave them that final push to leave, whether working from home, or relocating their business or home.

Birmingham doesn't have the attractions of being the capital city with all the centre of government, financial firms and other international businesses HQs to drive their business, plus the many and varied links to abroad, so the push to leave may be sooner, and more stark.

Slightly off-thread but has your boss ever considered replacing some or all of these regular internal meetings with Teams/Zoom or whatever your taste in online meeting software? Non-productive time is eliminated, no direct costs, essentially no pollution generated. I'm not saying that face-to-face meetings are never needed, particularly with customers in some parts of the world, but getting an internal team together in person once a month seems distinctly OTT in terms of benefit to the business.

Of course, you might well say that online meetings don't allow for a night out to be charged to the company. I couldn't possibly comment ...

There is a place for phone/video conferencing, but it's not for everyone (I found it often useless as an engineer), especially with the transmission dealsys often contributing to disjointed conversations (people talking over eachother or start-stop conversations because you can only see one person (e.g. the chair of the meeting) at one time.

In addition, problems when people need to look at drawings or multiple pages of documents quickly. Not so bad if everyone has easy access to all the data and there's a set / structured format to the meeting, plus everyone has ultra-fast broadband and decent computers, etc.