ROAD WARS
I’ll be charged £12.50 a DAY to drive to work under Clean Air Zone plans… so I got revenge on jobsworth road bosses
A DRIVER who is set to be charged £12.50 a day under new clean air zone rules has revealed how he got his revenge on jobsworth transport bosses.
Engin Coban, 48, from Catford in London, says he will have to pay the daily charge when Mayor of London Sadiq Khan's planned ULEZ expansion brings his street within the low-emissions zone in August.
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The handyman, who owns a car, a van and a motorbike, currently lives 100m from the ULEZ border.
He decided to get his revenge by walking around with a registration plate strapped to his back, deliberately tricking them into issuing fines.
Engin hopes that that the fake fines issued by the plate will overwhelm the system, forcing bosses to shut it down.
He told : "The new border will include my local area, so what do I do now?
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"Move out of London? Leave a customer base that I have built up over 16 years because I don't want to pay £12.50?"
Engin hopes that triggering the fines will force Transport for London bosses to waste time manually reviewing them.
He said: "Why make their lives easy when they are making my life hard?
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"I've seen people talk about smashing the ULEZ cameras but I don't want to do anything illegal.
"But these changes are destroying my livelihood so I thought let me make their lives a little harder.
"I'm assuming a computer recognises the number plate now but imagine if thousands of people joined in and overwhelmed the system and did the same thing I did."
Engin has refused to put up prices to cover the fines out of loyalty to long-time customers, adding that he has not raised them for 16 years.
He said that if the ULEZ expansion goes ahead he would need to buy a new compliant van, costing around £12,500, to keep his business on the road.
But Engin instead hopes that ULEZ will be "scrapped completely" before it's too late.
ULEZ, sometimes known as the Clean Air Zone, is an area of London where drivers of polluting vehicles have to pay a charge.
The £12.50 daily charge for driving in the area was first mooted by Boris Johnson before it was introduced by Sadiq Khan, who plans to expand it further in August.
A spokesperson for City Hall said: "Around 4,000 Londoners die prematurely each year due to toxic air, with the greatest number of deaths attributable to air pollution in London's outer boroughs.
"Expanding ULEZ to outer London will help five million more Londoners to breathe cleaner air, and improve Londoners' health."
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It comes after Sadiq Khan asked TfL to consider using ULEZ cameras to charge car users in a "pay-as-you-drive" scheme across London.
But drivers are catching on to a little-known loophole which lets motorists beat ULEZ restrictions.
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