"Not with those trucks!"

[wangell]

At a meeting last night discussing options for children in one fairly dense neighborhood to begin riding to school, one parent received considerable applause for her comment "not with those trucks on that street he won't"

There's been a lot of discussion about this in London and other cities with the key solution seeming to be to limit the times that trucks (lorries, HGV's) can come in to the area. The problem with this is that it only changes the time of day that people will be endangered. If you're unlucky enough to need to travel between the blackout periods, you're quite screwed. If school lets out early one day, those kids get to play dodge-the-lorry.

We need to focus on solving the entire problem, trucks on the streets, not just time-shift the problem.

As much as I dislike taxes of any sort, this may be a situation that calls for, not just taxes, but punitive taxes, something I hate even more. Most of the deliveries made by larger trucks can actually be made by much smaller and safer trucks. Or by cargo bikes. Significant congestion charges on trucks based on size and thus on how much of a problem they create, should encourage businesses to utilize more appropriate forms of transportation or rearrange their business to reduce how much they move goods around. The question though, is if this can be done without driving desirable businesses out.