Greater Manchester Brings Forward Proposals For Clean Air Plan

Greater Manchester is expected to bring forward its proposals for addressing air pollution in the city region in the coming weeks, elected members heard yesterday (16 August).

At a meeting of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority’s Planning, Housing & Environment Committee, officials were presented with an update on the Greater Manchester Clean Air plan, which is being overseen by Transport for Greater Manchester.

TfGM is leading the development of the plan on behalf of seven of the ten Greater Manchester authorities who were named within the government’s NO2 plan as being required to act to reduce nitrogen dioxide emissions. A finalised Clean Air Plans is due to be presented before the end of the year.

Papers released ahead of yesterday’s meeting indicate that options under consideration for the city region include the potential for a charging Clean Air Zone.

But, any potential charges would only to apply to private-hire vehicles, buses and HGVs, with the Greater Manchester Mayor, Andy Burnham, having previously ruled out a charge for private car drivers (see airqualitynews.com story).

Options

Other measures included in a shortlist shown to members include the potential for a workplace parking levy to encourage commuters to use public transport, increased public transport capacity, retrofit of the existing public transport and local authority fleets and incentivising an increased uptake of electric vehicles in the region.

In the update to members yesterday, TfGM noted that initial data of NO2 exceedances across the local authority areas has been submitted to Defra, which will shortly report back with specific requirements for emissions reductions required across the region.

Once this ‘target determination’ has been completed – likely to be this month – the Greater Manchester air quality steering group, will assess which options are likely to bring about the required reduction in NO2 levels demanded by government.

The papers note: "As government has identified charge-based Clean Air Zones as the benchmark measure, the modelling process used to identify a preferred option to achieve compliance in the shortest possible time in GM is required to focus on this measure first. The Steering Group members will brief senior officers and elected members within their organisations on the options for achieving compliance."

Officers will model which of these measures is likely to bring about compliance within the shortest possible time, before submitting a business case to government later this year. The proposals will be subject to the ‘relevant GM-level governance’, the papers indicate.

Public awareness

Members also heard that a programme of public awareness around air quality issues affecting the region is also under development.

This is expected commence during early autumn 2018 to ‘build greater public awareness and understanding of the GM air quality issue and associated impacts’.

Under the identity of ‘Clean Air Greater Manchester’, "this would build on past public engagement activity – e.g. Clean Air Day – and aim to educate key audiences about air pollution, the health impacts, and what they can do to make a difference," members were told.

Source : Air Quality News 

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Halt final TfL payment to Garden Bridge Trust, says shadow minister Andy McDonald

Preparations to pay the charity behind the Garden Bridge project its final multi-million pound chunk of public money should be suspended, the shadow transport secretary has said

The Garden Bridge Trust recently wrote to its public sector sponsor Transport for London with a request for up to £9 million of public money earmarked in an underwriting agreement provided by the Department for Transport (DfT).

However, Labour politicians including shadow transport secretary Andy McDonald have now called on TfL to withhold the money in the wake of a new legal opinion by a QC recently revealed by the AJ, raising the prospect of limiting the aborted scheme’s cost to the taxpayer, currently estimated at £46 million.

Jason Coppel, an expert in public and procurement law, said it was ‘likely’ that the trustees breached their legal duties to act with reasonable skill and care, ‘in particular in relation to the conclusion of the construction contract with Bouygues’, although he added that a claim against the trustees would not be straightforward due to the difficulty of any potential claimant proving they had suffered loss.

While Coppel’s opinion is understood to be strongly denied by the trustees, Labour London Assembly member Tom Copley has now written to TfL commissioner Mike Brown, attaching Coppel’s legal opinion and calling on Brown to ‘halt any payment of further public money to the trust’ until TfL had obtained its own legal advice over whether trustees had indeed breached their legal duties.

Copley’s intervention was backed by McDonald, the second shadow cabinet member to raise serious questions over the actions of the Garden Bridge Trust in recent weeks after repeated calls for a new Parliamentary inquiry were made by shadow communities secretary Andrew Gwynne.

McDonald said: ‘It’s the right thing to do by taxpayers to attempt to recover every penny possible from Boris Johnson’s scandalous Garden Bridge vanity project.

‘The taxpayer’s interest must be the priority, and that means using whatever legal means are available in order to limit the cost to the public purse.’

In his letter to Brown, which was copied to London mayor Sadiq Khan and the Charity Commission and was dated August 7, Copley wrote: ‘It has come to my attention that the Garden Bridge Trust has yet to draw down the £9 million of public money provided by the DfT, but has recently made a request to do so which TfL is reviewing.

‘I’m sure you will have seen the opinion of Jason Coppel QC … in light of this opinion from an eminent QC, which I attach, I’m writing to ask you to halt any payment of further public money to the trust until you have sought legal advice as to whether TfL can withhold further payments on the grounds that the trustees may have breached their legal duties. If this is the case it should be the trustees that are liable, not the taxpayer.’

In its latest set of accounts, published recently by the Charity Commission after being submitted more than 150 days late, the trust estimated that it would request £5.5 million or less of the £9 million underwriting facility from TfL in order to meet its financial liabilities.

The DfT’s guarantee was controversially provided in 2016 by then transport secretary Patrick McLoughlin in the face of strong opposition from the department’s then permanent secretary Philip Rutnam.

Brown has yet to reply to Copley but a TfL spokesperson said: ‘The Garden Bridge Trust has written to TfL with a request for payment under the underwriting agreement. We are currently reviewing their request.’

The Garden Bridge Trust is currently in the process of winding up and trustees were unavailable for comment.

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Young Couple ‘Nearly Die’ As Uber Car Plunges Into Sea…But Still Charged The £18 Fare

AN Uber passenger was still charged his £18 fare — despite “nearly dying” when his cab plunged into the sea.

Businessman Nick Christoforou, 31, and colleague Sophia Toon, 23, had to swim for their lives after their taxi drove off the end of a jetty.

Nick said: “One minute I was in the back of an Uber heading home, and the next I was in the sea.”

He went on: “I managed to get the car door open and got to the surface to find the others.

"If I wasn’t in a fit and able state we would all be 100 per cent dead.”

The real estate worker from Cockfosters, north London, was on a work trip to the South of France when he booked a car via the popular Uber app.

Sophia were picked up at 1.30am in Cannes by a driver in a Citroen DS5.

Nick said: “All of a sudden I felt falling.

"Five seconds later and the car was filling up with water.

“Even now I am not certain what caused it.”

The route the car travelled and its landing point

The car sank into water 3m (10ft) deep at Port Pierre Canto, a marina for 500 yachts in the city, which hosts Cannes Film Festival each year.

Nick swam to the nearest boat and pulled the others to safety.

The driver was breathalysed and found to be sober.

Uber driver plays game on his phone as he speeds along busy London street

No arrests were made.

A police spokesman said: “Luckily the car sank slowly, allowing some time for the occupants to get out safely.”

Source : The Sun.

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We Still Don’t Know Whether Uber Is a Real Business?

It has never had to live on the cash it generates

In March, Uber will turn 10 years old. On paper, it’s one of the world’s most highly valued companies. Uber has become a verb for rides on demand, changed the transportation habits of millions and pushed changes in city planning around the world.

But after a decade of operation and perhaps a year or so away from its initial public offering, an essential unanswered question remains: Is Uber viable?

Put aside questions about whether Uber is overvalued, evil or whatever other clouds exist. I’m talking about simple dollars and cents. Uber Technologies Inc. has burned through more than $1 billion in cash in the last year, by design, and continues to fund itself with the huge capital pools available for young superstar companies since about 2010. If all that cash from SoftBank, Saudi Arabian oil wealth, conventional tech investment funds -- or even cash from future public stockholders -- unexpectedly dries up, does Uber’s business model work? I don’t know, and almost no one else does either.

There are always questions about whether relatively young companies will have staying power, but because Uber has never had to finance itself solely with the cash generated by its businesses, questions about the company’s basic viability are even more urgent. 

It’s been said before that Uber has sensibly tailored its business strategy to the financial realities of the last eight or so years of financial markets. Never before has so much money been thrown at promising young technology companies, and for good reason. People with money are desperate to make more money, and private technology companies have been an appealing way to turn $1 into $10 or $100. 

If Uber had started just a few years earlier, it might have been confined to its original business of dispatching luxury cars. Instead, Uber has taken in more than $15 billion from stock sales and borrowings, and that cash has let Uber dream big. It offers semiprofessional drivers at the tap of a smartphone screen in dozens of global cities, has branched into transportation by bicycles and has visions of robot-driven cars and flying taxis. It’s investing in food delivery, matching supply and demand for freight and more.

Uber’s cash has let it become this ambitious, but it’s never been forced to live in a world where it has to operate solely with the cash it generates. The company’s free cash flow -- or cash generated by its operations minus costs for capital projects -- was negative $1.3 billion in the last 12 months, according to Bloomberg News and other media reports on the company’s self-reported, cherry-picked financial figures. For the sake of comparison to a recent but dramatically different era in technology, Facebook had positive free cash flow for three full years when it filed to go public in 2012. 

Don’t just listen to me about the importance of companies that can sustain themselves with their own cash flow. Listen to Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. "The most important factor for me," he said at a Fortune conference last month, is "cash flow generation."

 "I don't want to be dependent on private, public or any markets to fund the business expansion and the extraordinary expansion in front of us," he said.

Well said. Uber doesn’t need to be cash flow positive when it goes public. And maybe not for years. But eventually it does, and at this point it’s not clear how or when that might happen. 

Khosrowshahi and investors in both Uber and other on-demand ride companies have said the economics of the basic business are nicely profitable and improving in some established cities. They say finances for Uber and its rivals are distorted by intentional decisions to grab market share in many cities, global expansion into areas where rides aren’t immediately profitable and investments in promising but cash-draining businesses such as driverless cars.

Young tech companies often say they can pare spending or curtail growth investments if they need to fund themselves solely with cash their businesses generate. That sounds great, but it’s remarkable to think we don’t know what Uber’s business looks like -- or if it can even exist -- if the company had to live within its means.

If times change and Uber needs to become cash flow profitable earlier than it expects, what happens to Uber’s fares or the availability of rides? Does the cost for a ride double or triple? And if so, and demand for rides shrinks, how much more does it cost Uber to attract and retain drivers, which then depresses demand from riders? If Uber has to stop or pare back its investments in driverless cars or food delivery, what happens to the company’s future value or its cash flow?

And it’s not trivial to cross the chasm from a fast-growing technology company that needs constant fresh cash to a firm that can finance its own operations. In a recent analysis I did of tech companies that had gone public since 2010, I was surprised to see that some relatively seasoned companies had for years generated less cash than their businesses needed to operate. Companies such as Pandora Media and FireEye need continual supplies of fresh cash from stock sales or borrowings. 

To be clear, Uber had billions of dollars of cash on hand as of June 30. It’s not in danger of blowing up. But nothing about Uber is a sure thing. Not its eye-popping valuation, not its ability to withstand competition and regulatory challenges around the world, and certainly not its very viability as a business. .

Source : Bloomberg 

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Lawless London Illegal Electric Rickshaws Driven By Drunken Drivers....Enough's, Enough

'Lawless' rickshaw drivers are accused of drinking and cycling on the streets of London by disgruntled taxi driver

This is the incredible moment a London black cab driver caught out two rickshaw hosts drinking on the job. 

Driver, Tom, noticed the the two rickshaw drivers sitting in their vehicles and drinking alcohol. 

The 41-year-old decided to pull into the taxi rank next to them on Wardour Street in London and watch the pair as they guzzled cans of lager.  

Pair of rickshaw drivers caught drinking alcohol on the job

Tom, who shared the video on Twitter, confronted the drivers who then accused him of being racist. 

He tweeted: 'There it is , you can see #London is lawless #rickshaw 'drivers' drinking alcohol outside m&m store waiting to pick up children and their parents and posting as #taxi @TheLTDA @LTDAForum @The_LCDC @MetCC @TfL @MayorofLondon how long before they gonna kill someone?' 

The pair then go on to criticise Tom's ability to speak English and said, 'When you come to Europe, you need to learn the language.'

Two rickshaw drivers were confronted for drinking lager on the job in Wardour Street, London

The pair, who shared a can, called a black cab driver a racist when he confronted them

Tom said: 'I have arrived on Wardour Street and saw two rickshaws and their drivers sitting in one of them. 

'There was a can of lager on the floor so I decided to keep an eye on them. I put myself on the taxi rank then I noticed that they are actually drinking that lager.'

'It was outside M&M store so clearly they were waiting for children and parents to take them on the ride around London.   

'Those rickshaws have electric engines which makes them illegal and drunk driving that's even more dangerous. 

See ATMs video n Twitter here:

https://twitter.com/tom_1_3_/status/1029359107424313344?s=21

Tom took to Twitter to tell others about what he witnessed and raise awareness of drink driving

'I've called met police but they were extremely busy as it was the same time as that incident outside parliament so it was clearly ignored. 

'I decided to record those drivers to raise awareness about this illegal activities around West End. I'm shocked that TFL and met police is powerless around them. 

'Just wondering what needs to happen for them to be taken off the roads?' 

Source  : Daily Mail.

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Private Hire driver Allowed To Keep Licence Despite Previously Being Jailed For Child Sex Abuse.

A Private Hire driver has been  allowed to keep his licence and job despite previously being jailed for child abuse.

Sandwell councillors allowed the minicab driver to continue driving despite guidelines saying people convicted of sex offences be barred

Jailed for sexually assaulting a child he’s been allowed to continue working by councillors at a meeting held behind closed doors.

Sandwell councillors allowed the unnamed man to continue driving despite guidelines recommending people convicted of sex offences be barred from holding a private hire licence.

Members of the licensing sub committee made the decision at its meeting in July from which the public and press were excluded.

Minutes of the meeting released this week only refer to the driver as 'Mr S G' and exclude any information which identifies him.

The secrecy surrounding the decision has been criticised by the Chairman of the West Midlands Private Hire Drivers Association, who called for committees to be open to the public.

The conviction for sexual assault was revealed when councillors reviewed Mr S G's license.

They were told that in November 1999, he was convicted of indecent assault on a female under 14 and was jailed for three months by Warley Magistrates .

Speaking at the committee, Mr S G said he was at a fun fair and had sat next to a young girl.

Denying he touched her, he said the child reported him to the police and he was charged.

After adjourning to take legal advice, councillors decided to allow him to keep his PH licence and: "Warn Mr S G in respect of his conduct and the effect any further problems may have on his licence."

The minutes also show the committee's decision to depart from guidelines on sexual offences, was: "Due to the length of time that had lapsed since the conviction, his good driving record and good character."

"Mr S G had held a licence for 12 years and had not received any further convictions."

But Raheel Shah, Chairman of the West Midlands Private Hire Drivers Association, has criticised the decision and the secrecy surrounding it.

"No one with a conviction for sexual assault should be given a Taxi or Private Hire licence, " he said.

"I think meetings of this kind should be open so the public can see what is going on."

In a statement to the LDRS, Sandwell council admitted it knew of Mr S.G's conviction when they originally issued him a licence in 2007.

Explaining it's July decision, a spokesman said: "Sandwell's private hire and hackney carriage licensing policy, introduced in October 2017,requires existing licence holders who committed a serious offence in the past who have been previously licensed by the Committee or officers or Court to appear before the Committee to consider whether or not their licence should be revoked.

"The Licensing Committee will consider each case on its merits and take into account the length of time that has elapsed since the conviction and the drivers conduct and the length of time the licence holder has held a licence."

"The public and press are excluded from the hearing of individual cases. This is to avoid the possible disclosure of exempt information under Schedule 12A to the Local Government Act 1972, relating to an individual and or information relating to any action taken or to be taken in connection with the prevention, investigation or prosecution of crime."

TAXI LEAKS EXTRA BIT :

This is similar to the “killer on the Knowledge” case were TfL allowed Shamsul Haque, who murdered his wife and assaulted his daughter, to become a Private Hire Driver and also sign on to the Knowledge program to become a licensed Taxi driver. 

After two mass demonstrations outside Penton Street, the man was thrown off the Knowledge and had his PH licence revoked. 

It also heralded the exit from TfLTPH of many directors and managerial staff at that time, and rightly so. 

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Uber reportedly lost $891 million in the second quarter of 2018 as growth slows