Britain’s First Zero Emissions Zone
This month, Oxfordshire County Council and Oxford City Council will introduce Britain's first Zero Emission Zone (ZEZ) in Oxford. The pilot scheme will start on 28th February 2022 and apply to a limited number of roads in the city centre. Nonetheless, Oxford ZEZ represents a radical change compared to most already existing Clean Air Zones (CAZ) across the country, as ultra low emitting vehicles (i.e. vehicles with emissions of 75 gCO2/km or less) travelling across the region will now face a fee.
Clean Air Zones are restricted areas where only the cleanest (i.e. less emitting) vehicles are encouraged to drive. Any non-compliant vehicle would be required to pay a fee to travel across the zone. The Government introduced this measure to improve air quality in response to the increasing concern about the impact of air pollution on human health.
In addition to the expected CAZ objectives, Oxford's ZEZ aims to promote the shift towards zero-emission transport, thus slashing carbon emissions. For this reason, we investigated whether the introduction of Oxford's ZEZ or a CAZ in general impacts the car market using Birmingham and Oxford's case studies.
Birmingham City Council initially intended to introduce a CAZ in early 2020. The launch date was postponed to 1st June 2021 in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. We compared the UK average and Birmingham's market share of Battery Electric Vehicles (BEVs) as a function of time, as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1. Time series plot of UK’s average and Birmingham Battery Electric Vehicles (BEVs) market share. The black dotted lines represent the key dates in the policy introduction.
Figure 1 indicates that Birmingham's BEVs market share matched the UK average until the Government approved the CAZ. Shortly after this event, Birmingham's BEVs market share climbed consistently above the UK's average. A similar trend can be observed for Oxford in Figure 2.
Figure 2. Time series plot of UK’s average and Oxford Battery Electric Vehicles (BEVs) market share. The black dotted lines represent the key dates in the policy introduction.
The behaviour observed in Figure 2 indicates that the introduction of the ZEZ seems to accelerate the uptake of zero-emission vehicles in the area, as desired by the policy.
BEVs market share data for the considered case studies suggest that the introduction of Clean Air (or Zero Emission) Zones promotes the uptake of BEVs. Specifically, an increase in BEVs sales was observed after the policies were approved or announced, regardless of whether the launch date was postponed for different reasons.
While Oxford represents the first and only Zero Emission Zone in the UK, other councils like Bradford and Great Manchester will introduce CAZ later this year, hopefully increasing the uptake of electric vehicles in these areas.