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A couple of significant motoring announcements have been made over the last fortnight, but in rather typical fashion they are addressed at the capital and other southern regions, leaving me feeling that the north seems to get overlooked despite renewed talk of the 'Northern Powerhouse'.
Number plate recognition will be used in Westminster's F-zone to identify diesel vehicles and charge their drivers an extra 50% during normal hours from April 3rd in a bid to reduce NO2 and PM levels in the borough.
Despite January having seen a whopping 78% of private and business leasing clients still opt for diesel vehicles, partly because manufacturers and funders continue to package them more attractively, Westminster charging them more for parking is an idea I embrace in principle. I would welcome such a move here in Manchester, too, where PM levels were found to be illegally high in 2016.
In order to address the capital's £5.5bn annual loss to congestion during the last financial year, contributed to significantly by commercial vehicles that make up 80% of traffic in the city, the London Assembly has proposed that it may be wise to allow night-time deliveries.
Online shopping experiencing 10% year-on-year growth is unarguably behind a large chunk of van traffic's 3.8% proliferation to an all-time peak during 2016, and I put my hands up to regularly adding to the pile of parcels zooming around each week.
Manchester and the surrounding boroughs such as Stockport, Altrincham and Rochdale are relatively just as bunged up with commercial traffic as London in my view, so whoever ends up replacing Tony Lloyd as the Mayor of Greater Manchester in the spring should add night-time van and lorry movements to his or her list of potential traffic improvement measures. Electric vans like the Nissan e-NV200 would be ideal, while we await the arrival of Mercedes-Benz's incredible Vision Van or similar.
I catch a glimpse of a Tesla Model S at least once a day and have seen no end of them in Manchester city centre, making me wonder why the visionary company has made no apparent moves to install its brilliant superchargers inside some of the UK's congested cities.
With a few Model X examples now popping up on the region's roads each week, too, people are clearly catching on to electric cars, irrespective of the damaging VED changes on the way that will no doubt impact the purchase and leasing of £40,001+ ULEVs. Trudging all the way to Warrington to fast-charge one's Tesla up publicly is a bind, though.
Introducing a congestion charge to Manchester is always a contentious subject and I could only hail it as a success if public transport was massively improved as a result. I'm just tired of London, its suburbs, the Home Counties and even places like Milton Keynes trialling worthwhile initiatives while not much seems to be tabled for the north and its powerhouse.
Lee Wolstenholme is a director of Vehicle Consulting
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