Mayor of London Sadiq Khan has announced plans to close 20km of roads for London's biggest car-free day this September. Roads across the City of London, Tower Bridge and London Bridge will be closed to all private motor traffic on Sunday 22nd September in a bid to reduce the city's air pollution.
Residents and visitors to the area will be encouraged to explore the closed streets by foot, public transport or by bike with Khan suggesting the move could 'encourage as many Londoners as possible to join in the fun and see the city from a different perspective.'
The day will also see boroughs encouraged to create 'play streets' for children to enjoy on the day and to help bring communities closer together with 150,000 Londoners expected to take part.
This is all part of a bid to bring London's spiralling air pollution back under control. Air polluion is reported to cause 40,000 early deaths per year across the UK with the share of early deaths in London at 9,000. The capital's level of toxic air is deemed illegal.
A joint inquiry by parliament last year labelled the air pollution crisis a 'national health emergency' while a court labelled the government's plans to combat the country's toxic air as 'woefully inadequate'.
Pollution campaigners have largely supported the proposal from Mayor Khan.
Dr Audre de Nazelle of the Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial College London told The Guardian: 'Being aware of the scale of air pollution health problems is not enough. Actually living the joys of a car-free or carless city will do much more to create a positive vision of what a future healthy London could be like.'
Meanwhile, Areeba Hamid of Greenpeace UK praised London for following in the footsteps of cities such as Paris and Bogota, who already have car-free days, but warned that 'reducing toxic air pollution and carbon emissions are vital, but they are far from the only benefit of reclaiming our streets.'
Khan has recently begun to get serious with combatting London's issue with motor traffic and air pollution.
Earlier this week, the Mayor penned an open letter to Kensington and Chelsea council for rejecting plans for a new segregated cycleway from Wood Green the Notting Hill Gate before the public consultation had finished, asking council members 'how many more of your residents need to be maimed or killed' before they took cycle safety seriously.