London congestion charge
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The London Congestion Charge is a fee that is levied on all motorists entering the Central London area. Although London is not the first city to adopt congestion charging, it is the largest city to do so as of 2003. The organization responsible for the charge is Transport for London (TfL).
The fee was introduced on February 17, 2003. The daily fee of £5 (approximately €7.50 or US$8) must be paid by the registered owner of a vehicle entering, leaving or moving around within the Congestion Charge zone between 7 a.m. and 6:30 p.m., Monday to Friday.
The aim of the scheme is to encourage travellers to use public transport, cleaner vehicles, cycles, motorcycles or their own two feet instead of motor cars and vans, thus reducing congestion and allowing for faster, less polluting and more predictable journeys. TfL says that much of the money raised in the scheme will be invested in public transport.
The charging zone
The boundary of the zone is sometimes referred to as the London Inner Ring Road. Starting at the northernmost point and moving clockwise, the roads defining the boundary are Pentonville Road, City Road, Old Street, Commercial Street, Mansell Street, Tower Bridge Road, New Kent Road, Elephant and Castle, Vauxhall Bridge Road, Park Lane, Edgware Road, Marylebone Road and Euston Road. Drivers do not need to pay to use roads on the boundary. Over the Christmas and New Year period, 2002, markings were painted on all roads entering the zone to warn drivers of their need to pay the charge. The zone therefore includes the whole of the City of London, the city's financial district, and the West End, the city's primary commercial and entertainment centre. There are also 136,000 residents living within the zone (of a total population of around 7,000,000 in Greater London), though the zone is primarily thought of (and zoned as) commercial rather than residential. There is little heavy industry within the zone.
Enforcement
Two hundred and three cameras dotted around the edge of the zone take a digital photograph of each vehicle passing into or moving within the zone. Digital images are transmitted to the Driver and Vehicle Licencing Agency in Swansea where Automatic Number Plate Recognition software deduces the registration number plate of the vehicle. At midnight each day, the list of vehicles entering the zone will be compared with a list of people who have paid to enter the zone. The registered owners of unpaid vehicles will be fined. The fine is £80 (~ €119 or US$127). From 10.00 pm the charge is doubled to £10 (~ €15, US$16): this is intended to cut the number of last-minute payments.
Some vehicles such as buses, minibuses (over a certain size), taxis, emergency service vehicles, motorcycles, alternative fuel vehicles and bicycles are exempt from the charge. Residents of the zone are eligible for a 90% discount, if they pay the charge for a number of days at once.
Why the Congestion Charge is notable
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Congestion charging at Old Street |
The congestion plan has attracted a lot of attention for several reasons. It is the first large scale congestion charge scheme to be introduced in the UK (a much smaller £2 scheme has been trialled in Durham). If successful in reducing traffic congestion, other busy cities around the world are likely to follow suit. The plan relies on advanced technology. Drivers may pay the charge on the Web, by SMS text message or by phone. The total cost of implementing the scheme, including setting up the cameras, the call centre for processing payments and advertising to notify motorists of the scheme's introduction is in excess of £250m (~€375m,US$400m). The scheme is expected to pay for itself within three years.
The whole idea has been heavily criticised by some opponents. They argue that the public transport network has insufficient spare capacity to cater for travellers deterred from using their cars in the area by the charge. Further it is said the scheme will hit poorer sections of society more than the rich, as the charge to enter the zone is a flat £5 for all, regardless of vehicle size.
Mastek Ltd., based in Mumbai, India, has implemented the automation of this project right through from its inception to its implementation on February 17 2003.
Other cities to have a congestion charge include Oslo and Singapore.
Early experience of the London Congestion Charge in action
The congestion charge has now been in operation since the 17th of February. Before the Charge's introduction there were fears of a very chaotic few days as the charge bedded down. Indeed Ken Livingstone himself predicted a "bloody day". However the first two days so far have shown a sharp reduction in inner city traffic. On the first day 190,000 vehicles moved into or within the zone during charging hours, a decrease of around 25% on normal traffic levels. Excluding 45,000 exempt vehicles, the decrease is more than 30%. Colloquial evidence suggests journey times were decreased by as much as half. Just over 100,000 motorists paid the charge personally, 15-20,000 were fleet vehicles paying under fleet arrangements and it is believed around 10,000 liable motorists did not pay the due charge.
An extra 300 buses (out of a total of around 20,000) were introduced on the same day. Bus network managers reported that buses were little if at all busier than normal. London Underground reported that the tube was also little affected, but as the scheme beds in anecdotal evidence seems to suggest that crowding - always a problem at rush-hours on this network - is increasing somewhat. Some of the reduction in traffic was caused by the half-term school holidays but it is very unlikely this accounts for such a large drop in traffic. The chaos predicted by critics has not materialized so far. It remains to be seen what the long term outcome will be: it is possible that the first week of operation represents a "phony war" because of the school holiday, and that no conclusions at all may even begin to be drawn until after the schools have gone back.
At the end of the first week things seemed to be going well. Some newspapers (many of which loath Ken Livingstone), have been printing stories alleging various problems, but the traffic continues to run well and the anticipated disasters have not yet materialised. As noted above, the real test will only begin in the second and subsequent weeks of operation.
Two days into the first week after the school holidays, there are still no reports of traffic problems caused by the Congestion Charge. Traffic is reported as 20% less than usual.
History of the Charge
Many previous toll roads and bridges have existed in England, both now and in the past. Tolls became popular in England in the late 1600s following the decline of roads after the Protestant Reformation (Catholic monks no longer maintained the roads). By the end of the 1700s the intercity road network in England was primarily a toll road network of turnpikes. Toll roads eventually died out in the late 1800s due to competition from railroads and complaints from users making longer trips (thus needing to pay more tolls).
Whilst the scheme for a toll on inner-city roads has been widely credited to London mayor Ken Livingstone, Livingstone himself credits the idea of congestion charging to the right-wing economist Milton Friedman, though general road tolls have been advocated by many in the past, such as the 18th Century economist Adam Smith.
Similar schemes were being considered by the Government in the mid-1990s. The London Congestion Research Programme (HMSO, ISBN 0-11-551755-3) concluded in July 1995 that the city's economy would benefit from such a scheme. The power to introduce a form of congestion charge was given to any future mayor in the Greater London Authority Act of 1999. Having won the first mayoral election in 2000, Livingstone opted to exercise these powers as promised in his independent manifesto, and carried out a series of consultations with interested parties. The basic scheme was agreed in February 2002 and charging commenced with some concessions accepted on 17th February 2003.
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