If you’re a Londoner who’s a repeat offender when it comes to directing your ASOS deliveries straight to the office post room (because really, who has the sort of working hours that allow them to wait in for a parcel?) we have some very bad news. If new plans are put in place, office deliveries could become outlawed in a bid to reduce congestion and air pollution in the centre of the capital.
In a speech to MPs, London’s deputy mayor for transport Val Shawcross revealed that one in five vehicles on the capital’s roads are light vans, with the popularity of online shopping at least partly to blame for this increase.
To combat this, Shawcross suggests, companies should ban their employees from sending their deliveries straight to work and encourage them to use click and collect facilities (which can be found at transport hubs around the capital) instead.
‘We ought to be encouraging employers to ban private deliveries to premises in central London,’ she told MPs. ‘We need to be looking at click-and-collect type facilities in public transport modes so that people can collect their deliveries on the way home.’
Shawcross also proposed that London’s £11.50 congestion charge should be extended into evenings and weekends, when traffic is at its peak, and should allow extra charges for multiple trips in a bid to dissuade drivers.
While the prospect of never again breaking the monotony of a working day with the excitement of a delivery will come as a blow to London’s many online shopping aficionados, any step to tackling the capital’s air pollution problem is surely a positive one: London recently slipped down to 40th place in Mercer’s annual Quality of Life Survey due to problems with traffic and pollution, while earlier this year Mayor Sadiq Khan warned against exercising outside because of the ‘very high’ pollution levels.
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