TRANSPORT-BRITAIN: London Could Change Cities Around the World

By Sanjay Suri Reprint | | Print |

Sanjay Suri

LONDON, Feb 26 2003 (IPS) - The face of Central London has changed over the past week. And cities around the world are looking now to see if they can change as London has.

The change has come through the introduction of a congestion charge, a simple idea but worked in intricately. Every car entering the central – and congested – area of London weekday will have to pay a congestion charge of eight dollars a day.

The idea, says London Mayor Ken Livingstone who introduced what has also come to be called the ‘Kengestion’ charge, is ”to get London moving, and to raise money to improve our transport services.” With an average speed of 12 miles an hour in London and chronic money shortage, it was never going to be a bad idea – if it worked.

It seems to be working in its early days since it was introduced February 17. Traffic was down 25 per cent in the first week. No one knew whether that was at least partly due to the half-term school break. But traffic is down around 20 per cent also at the start of the second week.

”We are getting roughly half a million cars coming into the congestion charge area every week,” James Thomson from Transport for London, the agency running the scheme told IPS. That brings a straight weekly revenue of four million dollars. A charge doubled for late payment between 10 pm and midnight, and raised to 120 dollars, if not paid the same day, adds up to a happy budget for the Mayor’s office.

In its first two days the scheme raised an equivalent of 1.9 million dollars through the charge, and 2.5 million dollars in fines. The fines are expected to come down as more drivers learn to pay – through a choice of Internet, telephone payments and payments at retail outlets and parking lots. Of the 34,000 penalties issued in the first week, only 45 have so far been challenged.

The scheme cost 320 million dollars to set up, with much of the software programming designed by Mastek, an Indian firm based in Bombay. A city London once ruled now helps run its traffic.

About 800 cameras at 203 camera sites – an average of about four cameras per site – watch entry into Central London. An additional 10 mobile units are on standby to fill in unforeseen gaps.

Each site has an equal number of black and white cameras and colour cameras. The black and white cameras pick up the number of the car entering the zone and the colour camera takes a long shot of the car simultaneously. ”That tells us whether the car was a green Mercedes, for instance, so that one registration number cannot be used by more than one car to enter the zone,” says Thomson.

The running cost of the scheme is 136 million dollars. ”We are looking at a net revenue of about 200 million dollars a year,” says Thomson. That revenue could be used to raise ten times as much from banks.

Sounds good? To a lot of city governments worldwide, if not to London’s motorists. ”We are getting a lot of inquiries from cities around the world,” Thomson says.

The world is watching. The big ‘C’ painted on roads leading to the congestion charge area made broadcast footage around the world. ”The scheme has drawn interest from Amsterdam, New York, Tokyo, Cairo, Boston, Hong Kong, Copenhagen, Genoa, Helsinki, Brisbane, Kathmandu and Teheran,” Thomson says. Interest from other cities is growing.

Paris mayor Bertrand Delanoe has already arranged to visit London to study the scheme. The traffic chief of Rome Maurizo Thomassini has announced he is looking to the London model to consider expansion of an electronic scheme that controls entry to the historic centre of the city.

Transport officials say traffic jams cost business about 40 billion dollars a year in Europe.

The London charge is a pioneering scheme, though strictly not the first. A small-scale congestion charging scheme has been in place in Durham in northern Britain since October 2002.

Drivers are charged three dollars to enter the historic city centre. The scheme has led to a 90 per cent drop in traffic from 2000 to 200 vehicles per day. Other cities in Britain considering congestion charging are Birmingham, Bristol, Edinburgh, Leeds, Leicester and Manchester.

Environment groups that are often critical of government policies have welcomed the charge. ”The scheme might not be perfect, but the only way to find out what works and what needs to be looked at again is to try it and see what happens,” says a spokesman for Friends of the Earth.

The scheme has found early success, but critics warn it is still early days. There are fears that visions of empty roads could bring more cars driving in. Resumption of road works, which have been suspended temporarily, could bring the congestion back, motorists say.

The Automobile Association (AA) has voiced concern that it may not be possible to cope with a high level of fines. ”If they have budgeted for the staff and equipment to cope with 3,000 a day, and the flow is more than double that, the efficiency of the whole penalty system could come into question,” an AA official said.

Some of the difficulties have been welcomed. Livingstone announced Tuesday that bus timetables are being drawn up again because ”buses are now having to slow down as they are running ahead of schedule.” No one is seriously complaining about that.