Get ready for legit cars in Bus lanes too

It would appear that our backwards government is due to allow electric cars to use the bus lanes.

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/40-million-to-drive-green-car-revolution-across-uk-cities

Whilst I applaud any effort to reduce the environmental impact of London's famous traffic, I'm not sure that it's the wisest of moves. FML (fuck my lungs).

While I'm not in favour of the move, you do realise that electric cars in the bus lane will have no effect on your lungs, don't you? You do realise that electric cars don't actually have an exhaust mechanism, don't you?

Actually there was once a design for a car engine by which burning fossil fuels would drive a turbine to generate electricity to run a direct drive mechanism. It never got put into production.

Granted the electric cars themselves won't be pumping out harmful fumes, but the more busy and clogged the lanes get, the more vehicles that do emit fumes (buses especially), will spend more time in the lanes, thereby more emissions.

And another aspect is busy commuters cutting down the lanes without the prescience of mind that bus drivers have.

and of course the non-electric cars are going to follow suit when they see other cars using the lane because people are sheep and will do something they know is wrong if they see other people already doing it.

You can join us, but get used to driving very slowly as I won't be bunny hopping over sunken drains to let your noddy-ass cars past

Not sure fumes are the issue for most TBF

A dangerous aspect of this policy shift is that e-cars tend be almost silent.

I wonder if hybrid car drivers will think they're allowed to go in there?

Many Prius drivers (with Private Hire stickers in the back usually) assume they can use them anyway.

I rarely see any purely electric vehicles on my commute.

They don't, not really. With the exception of some acceleration noise, most sound from a non-electric car moving at urban speeds comes from the tyres in contact with the road surface. If a new, well tuned non-electric car were to be travelling in a bus lane, you'd not have much more chance of hearing it over the ambient noise of the city than an electric one. Bear in mind that hybrid vehicles such as the Prius or the Honda Insight have been travelling around our urban environments using electric engines for almost two decades now with no discernible increase in accident rate.

There are reasonable concerns about audibility above 30mph because they will be increasingly quieter than non-electric vehicles but retaining the same closing speed.

Yeah, my unscientific point was that additional vehicles in the bus lanes that are less audible/noticeable than buses or taxis seems potentially dangerous. But I'll certainly defer to stats that suggest otherwise.

Regardless of pollution output, people piloting empty cars should be discouraged from driving for traffic reasons. And like others, I fear this will just lead to hybrids following suit. It's just bad public policymaking for a number of reasons.

To further your point:

The Department for Transport (DfT) commissioned research to gather statistics on accidents involving electric vehicles with pedestrians who are blind or vision impaired to determine whether the perceived accident risk is real and whether electric and hybrid cars are more difficult to detect audibly than conventional internal combustion engine vehicles...The study found little correlation between pedestrian vehicle involvement density and noise level for the majority of vehicles. In addition, the analysis found no evidence of a pattern in pedestrian vehicle involvement densities when only considering those accidents occurring on 30 mph (48 km/h) or slower roads, or where the pedestrian was disabled. A previous study did not find an increased pedestrian vehicle involvement density for electric and hybrid vehicles with respect to their conventional counterparts, which raised the question as to whether added sound is necessarily required. The study also noted that some modern conventional cars are as quiet as their electric counterparts, even at low speeds...

I don't agree with electric cars in bus lanes, as bus lanes are there for congestion reduction and to offer a speed incentive to public transport as an argument against private vehicles.

But... I am actually for the use of bus lanes to be open to some other vehicles.

Specifically, I think that the monopoly that black cabs have over bus lanes is nonsensical. And that with the rise of Uber and PHV we risk losing universal access. That is, black cabs are wheelchair accessible, and one can even put a bike in them in emergencies, etc.

So what I think is that if the point of black cabs in bus lanes is to provide accessible access, then instead of potentially losing this with the rise of PHV usage, then we can actually provide an incentive to the PHV industry (Uber, AddLee, etc) such that any PHV that is fully wheelchair accessible (inspected at least once a year to be so), can use bus lanes and have airport access, etc on the same grounds as black cabs.

That for me is a benefit to the city as a whole, and as it would likely only represent a small number of PHV vehicles (the cost of such vehicles is significantly higher than your average Prius) it will have little real impact on congestion... buses will keep moving and lanes will mostly be clear.

But electric cars... this I think is kinda insane.

Presently electric cars are more expensive, have reduced range, require a private driveway or garage for charging... and effectively represent the highest paid members of society. This comes across to me as providing a set of perks to the rich, at the expense of everyone else. And it's going to be something that gets worse as more of the rich choose to buy an electric car for the purely selfish reason of getting bus lane access.

I know that if I find an electric car behind me in a bus lane I shall be enjoying a very sedate, non-sweaty, ride in the middle of the lane... barely above walking speed probably.

Agreed. It defeats the object of the lane's original intention; to move larger volumes of people more quickly than the regular alternative. If the bus lanes get filled up with cars like this;

then it's self-defeating policy.

While I like the idea of providing incentives to switch to an EV, allowing them in bus lanes is ridiculous. It will cause conflict between road users, confusion and slow down buses let alone impact on the relative safety of a bus lane (for cyclists).

Should be putting more effort into electrifying the Black cab model, and work towards banning private ICE car usage within the central London area. Or at least severely restricted.

Although the i8 wouldn't be classed as an Electric vehicle right?

More like the Renault Twizy, or Nissan Leaf

That's the grey area that will inevitably happen, once hybrid owners see genuine electric-only cars in the lane. I could be wrong, but no reason to believe the sheep-mentality as mentioned earlier, won't prevail.

A token electric vehicle for commuting is a common setup in the posh roads near me.

Here's one with a Twizy so that he doesn't have to commute using his Land Rover, or his McLaren P1 (although this has recently been replaced by a Lotus 7, times must be hard):-

https://goo.gl/maps/36nkHA6NNg72

True. Either way, it's a stupid proposal. Encourage green transport YES!
Oh look, there's those cheap and readily available bicycles, no wait, multi thousand pound electric cars, we'll foster those instead.

coming to a bus lane near you:

Agreed about all your wheelchair accessible stuff.

My pet peeve about bus lanes is the ones that are only bus lanes at certain times. I come down Holloway Road, often having to arrive at work for 6:30. At this time traffic is pretty light, and the bus lanes are not bus lanes yet. This means they are used by buses, bikes, taxis and dicks who swerve into them to undertake cars that are going a bit slower than the dick would like.

Hate this idea. I do a fair bit of my commuting in the early hours of the morning when cars are allowed in the bus lane. Most people aren't savvy enough to realise this, so queue up in the "car" lane. Every now and then I get close passed by someone who is savvy (but also a terrible human being) and is hooning it up the inside to jump the queue. I could see this happening a lot more if this rule comes in.

Edit - Beaten to it ^

Sorry, can't get past the #AccidentalPartridge in the third para, 'access to BUS LANES'.

I don't think you chaps understand - if I can afford to spend £90k on a Tesla then why the fuck would I want to sit in traffic with the plebs?

It's my right to cruise down the bus lane, the only thing we need to do is get the cyclists and buses out of the fucking lane so I can have it to myself.

Bus lanes for rich people, povo's in the road, it's a winner.

Every now and then I get close passed by someone who is savvy (but also a terrible human being) and is hooning it up the inside to jump the queue.

these seem to be the only people who use the bus lanes outside of restricted hours and they ALWAYS pass within the lane leaving zero space

I have bought a double decker bus. It just seems the logical thing to do.
Cliff Richard and his young pals will be driving it around while I do my thing upstairs and rent my flat out to tourists.

This has been coming for some time. It may seem small in itself but it's part of the car industry's major push to replace petrol-fuelled cars with pretty much the same. Lobbying on this has been going on at least since the mid-Noughties. Needless to say, it's greenwash, and while it may be superficially attractive to reduce fossil fuel emissions in urban centres in this way, the emissions of course don't actually disappear, and the three real problems with cars, apart from the superficial ones (those that can be 'corrected' using different technology) don't disappear but are likely to get worse.

These problems are:

(1) The isolation from their environment to which people are subject while in closed carriages (including the likely impact on public transport);
(2) the consequent lack of exercise, which will make public health problems even worse;
(3) and the continuing dissociation of travel origin and travel destination. This is quite a complex point to explain, but essentially revolves around an ever-increasing need to travel because of the concentration of destinations at very few points, e.g. in Central London, whereas community life declines.

Electric cars are seen by the car industry as one of three or four key pillars of their future strategy. The others are self-driving cars (all of those that are being tested are electric), road user charging (to finance more roads), and (although it is uncertain whether this will be successful) 'brokering' use of privately-owned transportation services, i.e. for the car companies to own the cars that are driven on demand and enabling people to order them whenever and wherever they want. While this will sometimes involve ride sharing (which is one of the ways in which this is currently being promoted, as part of the lie of the 'sharing' economy), most likely it will eventually not involve very much sharing.

Anyway, it's all a pretty rotten business.