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You clearly don't live in the same area of London as i do. Around here, there are plenty of (either poor or just cheap) people with 10+ years cars (a real old, but still usable car can be bought for less that 500 GBP).

Come to think of it, at 8 pounds a day (source), if you use your car to commute to London every working day, then at 48 * 5 * 8 = 1920 pounds (52 weeks - 1 month vacations TIMES 5 days a week TIMES 8 pounds), the cost of the road tax significantly outweights other costs (for example, road tax is about 150 pounds a year). Come to think of it, with 1920 pounds one can even buy a decent 1994 Mercedes around here.

And by the way, the last reports i saw put the current levels of congestion at 7% below the ones when the "Congestion Charge" was introduced (unfortunatly the source of this is one of those free newspapers given out at the tube stations, so no online references - sorry) not 26%.

While i personally believe people should commute to the center of any city as much as possible via public transportation (underground - aka tube - coverage in London is excelent, even if the tube is very prone to delays), the current "Congestion charge" (which should be called the "London Road Tax" imho) is clearly a thinly disguised Tax, not a congestion control mechanism.

Now, if the procedings of the "Congestion Charge" were actually used to improve traffic conditions in and around London (from experience, compared with other big cities in Europe, the great circular roads around London are a total joke) and to facilitate access to public transportation (for example, by building big parking areas outside London next to train/tube stations which would then "feed" the passengers into the rest of the London tube network) then i would start to believe that this is not a Tax. As it is, the money from the road tax is being used by Ken Livingstone to increase the number of traffic wardens (= more parking tickets), promote his own pet causes and go visit Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.

Altough i have yet to pay a cent in "congestion charges" (i live in London and recently got myself a really cheap car only because I need it to access areas OUTSIDE London which are far from public transportation), i still get majorly pissed off with the spin portraying this tax as a "congestion control mechanism", the fact that the congestion charging zone keeps getting extended (and will eventually cover the place where i live, making me pay a reduced charge, even though i use my car to get OUT of London, not in) and the way the money made with this tax is being wasted with increasing the Mayor's bureaucracy and promoting his pet political causes instead of really fixing the problems with the whole traffic and public transportation infrastructure in London.

The Mayor has used some of the money on token investments in Bus lanes and such, but as any Londoner would tell you, buses are the slowest way to get anywhere in London, mostly because they take long, winding paths through the middle of the neighbourhoods, not around them.

The real big (read costly) issues (such as the ageing tube and the lack of an integrated public transport infrastructure to feed commuters to and out of London) have barelly been touched.

The City of London (Financial district) has had a "ring of steel" (police cordon and camera's, with the *occasional* spot check) since the mid 90's, this was eventually widen and finally formed part of the congestion charge zone, in 2003, which was then widened again in 2007 to include a large part of West London. http://www.cclondon.com/download/DetailMapECCZ.pdf There is currently a consultation published to convert the *congestion* charge to an emissions related charge.

I think it's a good idea with a lot of potential here in Europe, maybe not in the US.

I see these cars and the similar Smart car all the time around my office in central London. Seems to be because they are exempt from the London Congestion Charge ($16 / day at the moment so if you drive around London I guess you'll soon make your money back ...).

For me it's definitely enough car. For most people it would make a great second car.

If you don't have kids or carry lots of luggage regularly, then these cars are great. Easy to park, cheap to run. As a second car for going to the shops they'd probably make sense too.

Rich.

A carbon tax, levied on the f*ng idiots who drive SUVs in the city. Ideally, I'd like this tax to be paid each year, and it's amount to be directly proportional to the oil consumption of the car? Own an SUV? Fine, that will be 50% of its price, every year, as long as you own it. Own an hybrid/highly efficient/electric car? Fine, that will be 5% of its price every year. Don't own a car? Using your feet/your bike/ mass transit? OK, no taxes for you.

They're actually getting pretty close to this in London. Already, UK vehicle tax is based on carbon emissions and the London Congestion Charge (the fee that has to be paid to drive into central London) will more than treble from £8 a day to £25 a day for the most polluting cars from 2009.

Incidentally, the Mayor of London is slightly more diplomatic about SUV drivers than you, merely branding them "complete idiots".

Hear hear!

...although in fairness, I should point out that in London we have the Congestion Charge now, which costs you £8 per day to take your car into central zones.

OTOH, even before the Congestion Charge, I would never drive in London if I could avoid it - it's just not worth the stress. And the public transport is far from perfect, but at least it's there.

It's driving or walking, and I sure as hell ain't walkin'.

Well, you could get a Segway :-)

Seriously, I'm not saying you shouldn't be able to drive. But even if gas prices in the US double you'd still be cheaper than just about everywhere else, plus there's suddenly a serious incentive for people to buy more eco-friendly vehicles (and manufacturers to develop better ones).

So go wait in line at the bus stop or train station and STFU yourself. A lot of us over here don't have a choice on buying gas.

It's not just those in the US that don't have a choice - and BTW if you want to drive into London or on certain roads there are additional charges, just as there have been on French autoroutes for years.

Pfft. Doesn't really matter though. In forty or fifty years, when all the oil runs out, you *really* won't have a choice.

This is already in effect in London.

Its called the congestion charge.

Whenever you enter the centre of London, your number plate is scanned, and you are sent a bill for your time there.

I didn't have a clue what the poster was talking about (Congestion Charge)... so I asked google:

http://www.cclondon.com/whatis.shtml

Suddenly, this RFID buisness doesn't seem so bad in comparison to what Londoners are already going through.

And dont even get me started on the automatic congestion charge cameras.
More details here

The city centre of London is a congestion charging zone - i.e. vehicles that go inside the city are charged per day for using the roads there. However, vehicles that use alternative fuels are exempt from congesion charging. Looks like this GPS measure is needed to make the cabs exempt from the charge. Looksee

and how close are they to the plates when the pictures are taken?
For the pernament ones, I don't know, it might be on the website.
The vans (one parks outside my work place every now and again) have a set of 2 or 3 cameras just on top of the van.

I always thought that OCR in this way was at best an inexact science.
Nope. It is just an expenive one.
I work at a new reading agency (we scan newspapers, then send out articles mentioning client companys (or other key words)).
While it is not 100% perfect, it is very very good.

Completely wrong.

London has a congestion charging system that requires drivers travelling into a centrally-located zone. The cameras are located at the zone boundary and track only the registration numbers (licence plates) of those vehicles that enter the zone between 7.00am and 6.30pm, Monday to Friday, excluding public holidays. This is done only to record which vehicles need to pay the charge on any given day; nothing more, nothing less.

All data, except in the case of vehicles that do not pay the charge within the alloted time (for which data is kept as evidence until payment is resolved), is deleted within 24 hours. This, together with other information on the scheme can be found on its official web site.

Parking meters in London

London Congestion Charge

The congestion charge has pros and cons. It seems to reduce traffic somewhat, generates money to be used for buses, and probably cuts pollution. Some argue it works too well, hurting businesses in the central zone, and some people are occasionally sent a fine for not paying the charge even though they never went near the central zone. It works by a camera trying to OCR the license plate. The recognition can go wrong, and the camera can take snaps of people who don't actually enter the zone occassionally.

Still, personally I'm in favour of it - I don't drive in London because it gets in the way of my drinking.

The technology for this is already in place in central London, UK. The centre of London is now a "Congestion Charge" zone, which means you have to pay a toll if you want to drive there. Cameras snapshot your license plate as you enter and leave the zone, and if you haven't pre-payed, you get a bill in the post.

They are all problems caused by abundance in a world more attuned to scarcity. By achieving the goal of abundance, technology renders the natural checks and balances of scarcity obsolete.

The automobile made it possible for individuals to travel 100 kilometres in an hour. The result is that roads and parking must potentially accommodate everyone driving downtown from an area approximately 200 Km in diameter. The speed of travel reduces the constraints of distance. When we unthinkingly increase the speed at which we can travel, we increase the distance we travel without thinking.

The government built a bunch of roads and isn't charging much in the way of tolls for their use. Suprise! The roads are crowded, and you can get stung by traffic jams (i.e. "long lines"). Everybody wants to use the roads because they're "free" and gas doesn't cost much in the US (I've heard it argued that we effectively subsidize that too).

It isn't so much that people aren't adjusting to the crowding as the crowding happens, because they certainly are (try googling "traffic evaporation" some time). It's just that some people are total gluttons for punishment in this respect, spending four hours a day in nail-biting traffic if it means reducing their morgage payments slightly.

The author insists "We can't solve traffic congestion by reducing the speed of traffic to 10 KM/Hr." But no one suggests that that's the solution. What they do propose is "congestion charging" to discourage people from driving when and where it tends to be too crowded (e.g. they recently began experimenting with this in downtown London).

What this says about internet traffic, on the other hand, I dunno. I would hate to think that ARPA blew it by not building in per-byte charges into the net, but at the very least you could make a plausible case for that.

However I've just had an extremely painful experience trying to pay the CC. Their website is absolutely atrocious, breaking just about every usability rule you could think of. eg navigation buttons implemented in Java??!! Why, oh why?! And trying to use it in Lynx (or links) - well, forget it. Then the actual navigation itself is completely b0rked. I imagine 90% of people arriving on the front page want either (a) a link to the "pay online now" form, or (b) the phone-number for paying by credit card. I encourage anyone with ten minutes on their hands to visit the above URL and try hunting for those bits of information. No points for getting half-way through completeing the form before realising they're actually trying to REGISTER you (as in, collect personal info) rather than just taking CC details and car registration number.

So I fired off a somewhat ranty complaint using their (equally dreadful) "contact us" stuff. Yes we've got a fancy DHTML form with a font size set unreadbaly small which stops you typing more than a couple of hundred chars. Oh and of course let's waste 70% of the screen real estate on whitespace , pointless graphics etc etc.

Today I got a response back. Of course it's a canned reply - what really put the icing on the cake was that the mail arrived with an attached HTML page (!) called something like "template.109797653-236" !! Have these people never heard of RFC822? I heard a rumour that the IT infrastructure was built by EDS, which might partly explain how utterly, utterly shite the site is.

I have similar feeliongs about the Oyster card - in theory a smart swipeable card is a good idea, and collecting anonymised data on which journeys people actually make is obviously a Good Thing for planning, resource management etc. but why do I get teh feeling that a bureacracy is rolling and, in tune with the evil schemes of Mr Blunkett, is planning to violate all alleged 'civil liberties' BY DEFAULT? If only a few civil servants would lose their pensions when the inevitable review by the EU court of human rights throws out the whole scheme... ah well a man can dream can't he...

I shall also miss the old cardboard tickets when they're finally phased out. Apart from the saddo-anal-retentive thing of keeping old tickets stamped with particular dates (elections, dead royals, and other days of special celebration) they're absolutely perfect roach material. I shall have to return to collecting old club fliers on Saturday mornings...

Well, here in the UK, license plates have very strict rules about typeface and spacing. Ideal for OCR.

>Shouldn't they increase the capacity of public transit before they force people to use it

they are, loads more buses paid for out of the congestion charge.

They tried for years to do this (decrease Central London traffic) voluntarily and it didn't work

cclondon.com

One of the exemptions is for "Vehicles with 9 or more seats". Can't wait to see the new breed of monster SUV's that suddenly become popular in central London . . .

For those of you not too familiar with London, a map of central London with the congestion charging zone can be found here on the Transport for London website.

In brief, you're being charged 5 pounds per day inside to drive inside the congestion charging zone, which covers most of central London. The charge applies from 7.00am till 6.30pm Mondays to Fridays excluding Public Holidays (of which we get alot fewer than you 'merkins), the charge doesn't apply at weekends, and there exemptions and discounts available if you actually live within the zone or are disabled.

Considering how heavy the traffic in central London actually is, anything that might actually provide a bit of relief is welcome.

For those of you not too familiar with London, a map of central London with the congestion charging zone can be found here on the Transport for London website.

In brief, you're being charged 5 pounds per day inside to drive inside the congestion charging zone, which covers most of central London. The charge applies from 7.00am till 6.30pm Mondays to Fridays excluding Public Holidays (of which we get alot fewer than you 'merkins), the charge doesn't apply at weekends, and there exemptions and discounts available if you actually live within the zone or are disabled.

Considering how heavy the traffic in central London actually is, anything that might actually provide a bit of relief is welcome.

Accoring to a page on the Transport for London website, about 1.1 million people currently use the tube during the morning peak period. They estimate that this will only increase by about 1% when congestion charging starts. We'll see on Monday.