London to Introduce Traffic Congestion Charge

Vivek writes "BBC is reporting that Londoners will have to pay a 5 pound "Congestion Charge" starting Feb 17. According to this Times of India article, an Indian software firm called Mastek developed the .NET based software to implement the plan. In the absence of toll booths, it reportedly uses character recognition from 700 surveillance cameras to identify defaulting license plates." See our previous story for background.

Comments

Not addressed in the article

[JohnCub]

Why in the world don't they just make the roads bigger? Doesn't that seem to be the logical route, rather than rely on high technology? Sure, I'm all for high tech, but we're talking about roads and traffic. People might be displaced, but they would get fair market for their houses, if the system is the same as it is here in the US.

Re:Not addressed in the article

[Zog The Undeniable]

It's a small country. The UK has roughly 1/5 the population of the US, most of them in England, but a miniscule land area. We have built bigger roads, but then people just take the opportunity to live further and further away from work. There are 3 million more cars on the road since 1997 and average commuting distances have done something like treble over the last 20 years. We are already well over capacity as far as cars are concerned.

Re:Not addressed in the article

[Lebannen]

I can't figure out if this is a troll, but as it's been marked Insightful....

We're talking central London. very Central London. This is all office blocks, shops, and clubhouses. Property here is really expensive, and real estate is at a premium. Widening the roads would either require rebuilding practically the whole of the area or removing pedestrian walkways. Neither is practical.

The point of the congestion charge is however to move traffic onto the public transport systems instead. Of which both the bus and tube networks are overcrowded anyway, especially the Tube. The Govn't claims the Tube isn't overcrowded, but the Underground regularly closes stations due to overcrowding and is jam-packed* for a very broad definition of 'Rush Hour'.

At the moment, of course, a couple of the arterial underground lines are closed due to a derailment that happened a couple of weeks ago. This has made it oh so much worse...


*Disclaimer: not as full as systems like the Tokyo tube, obviously, but London isn't nearly as dense and could be vastly improved.

Re:Not addressed in the article

[ponxx]

> Why in the world don't they just make the roads bigger?

Somehow that reminds me of the infamous Marie Antoinette quote "Let them eat cake". The whole problem is that there is *no* space left in london to make roads bigger and wider. As for sprawl, commuters already live as far as 1-2 hours train car/train journey away. I think anywhere short of tearing down the whole city and rebuilding it US style (and I have to say I much prefer the crowded London over the endless sprawl of LA) the only solution is to get people on public transport.

Charging a fee for a rare good (space on roads in this case) is something that should be very natural to capitatlists around the world, yet many countries such as the US or Germany (or Britain in fact) see the free use of roads as a divine right no-one should interfere with (while at the same time complaining about large governments and tax..).

Re:Not addressed in the article

[zenyu]

Say there's a one-lane dirt road that goes between two towns, and it has gotten awfully crowded because people now commute between these towns a lot.

So you replace it with a 20-lane superhighway. I really cannot see how that'd make the commute slower.


I don't think this theory applies to a highway connecting two seperate towns. Here there would be some settlement along the road, assuming it's long enough, to service the travelers, but it wouldn't have more congestion. The reason this theory comes up in urban planning is because any road you build outside a city will connect some suburb to the city. The land reached by the road is 4x greater for every doubling of its length, you reach a large number of single family homes very quickly. But the space left for lanes into the city shrinks the closer you get to the city center, so if everyone is heading there all you do by widening a feeder highway is move the bottleneck closer to the city. This is bad, you effectively lower the marginal cost of moving further away from the center of the city (with the no uncongested highway), and increase the cost of living for everyone (in terms of time spent in traffic). This forces people out further, increasing average trip time and congesting the road again. Now everyone is spending more time in traffic, a lose-lose situation for the city and its suburbs. (There are always some winners, for instance, the housing developers that buy some farmland to convert to housing when the highway comes.)

Charge?

[HarveyBirdman]

When I saw Traffic Congestion Charge I had a vision of a quantity of C4 blasting the cars out of the highway lane in front of me in the morning.

Actually, as a highly paid engineer god, I would support a minor usage fee for freeway access during rush hour to clear out some of the riffraff. :-) A few years back our local highway department ran a survey and found aout that almost half the people on the freeway in the afternoon rush really didn't *need* to be there.

Re:Charge?

[monkeydo]

When the Golden Gate Bridge was built, the plan was to only charge a toll until the cost of the bridge was completed. Once they met that mark, they said that they needed the money to pay for maintenance. We knew at the beginning that once they start charging us for something, they'll never stop.

And if you look at how much they collect per month on the GGB compared to what it costs to maintain it, you'll see that they collect much more than they need. So why don't they lower the toll? They aren't supposed to be making a profit. But that extra money is already being spent and they don't want to stop now.

Well, you are completly misinformed, and just plain wrong. The budget for the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway
and Transportation District is available in .pdf online if you care to red it, but allow me to summarize.

47% ($82 million) of the budget comes from GGB tolls
34% ($60 million) comes from government grants
The rest comes from transit fares and other sources.

Far from making a profit, the tolls barely pay for the operating costs of the bridge and transit. Most of the funds used for capital improvement come from other sources.

Have you ever been to London?

[EnglishTim]

London doesn't have the room to widen the roads. The road layout in the centre of London is in many places hundreds of years old. None of the US-Style grid system.

The cost of widening roads in central London would be astronomical - not to mention the fact that there are a lot of very old buildings that you can't just knock a bit off from.

It's not going to scale

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been working with .NET and all I have to say it, it won't scale. With the amount of traffic it's going to have to handle, pure and simple it's not going to scale. Just because it works for a half dozen cars a minute, doesn't mean it will work for less than ideal situations or massive congestion.

What about anti-photographic measures?

[gpinzone]

I'll assume these are illegal in London, yes? If not, I plan on buying stock in any UK based company that makes these.

Re:What about anti-photographic measures?

[dcuny]

I heard about this the other week on NPR (in quite a bit more depth), and they mentioned that a lot of people are looking into technology to shield their plates from cameras. They are illegal, but akin to radar detectors in the US. Being illegal isn't much of a deterrent.

It's not clear that the 'tax' will have much effect, since most estimate that it would take about 16 pounds to have any real effect.

They also reported that the people hardest hit are likely to be the small shops in London which do deliveries. Most residents already walk or take the tube.

Visiting my brother in London, I was struck by the difference in scale between London and any other large US city. In the US, when you shop you fill up a large cart, stuff your minivan, and fill your fridge. In London, you take enough to fit into a shopping bag, carry it home, and put it in your small fridge in your modest kitchen (all things being relative, of course).

Still, the proposal is a start on a real problem of traffic that's not unique to London, and a number of large US cities are watching it closely.

Getting Around It

[ackthpt]

I heard about something similar on the BBC a couple days ago, apparently a dose of hair spray on the license plate fouls up the reflectivity of plates, foiling the cameras.

There was some cartoon, ages ago, where a girl always seemed to fix car problems with a can of hair spray. That cartoon was visionary.

Just to be absolutely clear..

[Zog The Undeniable]

The main aim of this is not to raise money. It is to discourage people from driving into central London. All the funds raised have to go into improving public transport (basically buses, as the Tube is at or near capacity) by law.

What is sad is that, while everyone agrees Something Must Be Done About Traffic, it is seen as a huge political gamble for Ken Livingstone, the London Mayor, whom all the political parties hate (he was even kicked out of the Labour Party and stood as an independent candidate). He's got the nerve to at least try and sort out the problem, and whatever his politics, I admire him for that.

Re:Tubes already crowded

[intheory]

no joke. i was in london for a school trip that week the derailment happened, and a cross-town bus trip jumped from a 1-hour inconvenience to a 3-hour nightmare. i really had expected the tube to function at least as well as the L in chicago, seeing as how they've had the tube around for so long, but it is in need of a serious reworking, (not to mention a deep cleaning!)

.NET - ha

[DrSkwid]

My last company was invited to work with the contractors for this. We'd done some work with the Criminal Records Bureau. The Congestion charging scheme was falling behind schedule and they were hoping for all the input they could muster.

The .NET bit was some sort of high-up choice, probably to do with Microsoft's cosying up to "New" Labour to roll out Passport based e-government services [since rolled back in again].

The web operation is supposed to be a front end to everything, tbh the diagrams we were shown were a right spaghetti.

I can't remember what questions I asked but they were answered with blank stares and shrugs.

I'm glad they found some contractors. I really didn't want to do it [I'd danced with the Devil back in IIS4 days and have burnt toes].

The charging wont really help congestion on it's own. London is the worst place in the UK to drive round. 1mph is not much fun on a daily basis. Yet London has the best mass transport system in the UK but then again it doesn't have much competition.

The root cause of Uk traffic problems are the insistence that the rail network should be open to competition so we have 8 rail operators competing by running trains to different destinations. How trains in the SE compete with trains in the NW is unclear to me. Instead of decent travel we have bare bones operations where cut corners cost lives.

The road freight operators and subsidised by other road users whereas the railways have to pay in full for their tracks.

A forward sighted govt. would realise that inter-city rail travel should be invested in for the benefit of the people but hey profits not people is the rally cry of the capitalists.

Rail travel should be the mode of choice over 50 miles. Instead it is cheaper to travel by car.
I can drive the family from here to the capital and back [about 150 miles] for about £25. Take the train and we're looking at £120 for the four of us.

And then they wonder why the place of chock full of cars !

Re:.NET - ha

[Malc]

"The root cause of Uk traffic problems are the insistence that the rail network should be open to competition so we have 8 rail operators competing by running trains to different destinations. How trains in the SE compete with trains in the NW is unclear to me. Instead of decent travel we have bare bones operations where cut corners cost lives."

They're like local monopolies aren't they? I guess it means that poor operators can be replaced by different companies. The competition comes about during contracting bidding, which of course encourages cost cutting up front.

LCD shutters for license plates

[morcheeba]

Someone had a solution for this... A pair of LCD shutters for the license plate, each covering half of the digits. They turn on and off rapidly (so it wouldn't be too noticable to the eye) and exactly out of sequence. Thus, any photograph taken with a reasonably short exposure would capture only of the plate. A video camera would capture the whole plate on successive frames, but no single frame would have the entire plate number. Thus, the OCR would fail.

A spinning fan in front of the plate would also do the trick, but might take off someone's fingers.

Here's a googled automatic license plate reader.

becomes unfair

[EEgopher]

I agree; if they implement this, the money should go to expanding the subway or putting a new useful road somewhere. What I don't like is the way it doesn't affect the rich in the least. Granted, they will spend the most money downtown, but the poor don't live in expensive suburbs; they mingle and transverse the bustling (congested) hub.

Re:Tubes already crowded

[Malc]

Or the scheme in Cairo that I saw on BBC World last night. Their streets are meant for 0.5 million cars, yet they have 2 million there. They showed the cars tripled parked. Just leave the handbrake off and give some guy on the steet some money and he'll push and bounce it in to place.

Anyway, it always made me wonder why anybody would actually want to drive in the centre of London. Too slow, and too much stress from all the other vehicles and pedestrians.

"User Fees" == Double Taxing

[stratjakt]

It's pretty ridiculous that they'd even allow this. Here in the states, I pay a toll to cross a bridge to get home. This is somewhat logical because maintainance of the bridge is not covered in the tax structure, so you pay if you use it.

Back home in Canada, there was a similar bridge near my home, and it was toll-free, because everyone payed for it out of their taxes.

The UK/Canadian system is more socialist - everyone pays a little to spread out the cost. The US takes a little more of a 'pay for play' approach with user fees.

So now Londoners are paying twice for the roads they drive on. I'd be pissed if I were they.

A possible solution to the problem in the article

[Thoguth]

The BBC article focuses on the problem of traffic problems increasing on the perimiter of the toll areas. A possible solution for this would to have a "fuzzy" or probablistic charging scheme with multiple perimiters. Within one perimiter, you have say, a 10% chance of being charged, and inside another, smaller area there may be a 50% chance of being charged. The highest congested areas can give a 100% chance of being charged.

That might, of course, bother people who un-luckily got charged more than they felt was right. Still you could get the same effect from charging in graduated increments, 10% toll in an outer perimiter, 50% in the middle and 100% in the peak area, so that drivers avoiding the toll will be spread out according to who wants to avoid how much of a toll.

Exemption for using the correct type of fuel

[Rik Sweeney]

If you use the correct type of fuel (I think it's Diesel) then you become exempt from the Congestion Charge.

Why such a clumsy system?

[Dixie_Flatline]

That system seems a bit clumsy. It sounds fairly expensive, too.

In Singapore, they have a system where every car is fitted with a card reader for a cash card. Every time you enter a zone where they want to keep congestion down (I only saw one while I was there) it automatically deducts $1 off of your cash card. Taxis and busses entering the area charge more, too. (Busses are also done on with an electronic card system. You wave your magnetic cash card in front of the reader when you get on, and when you get off. Prices are based on how long you've been on the bus.)

700 cameras and a lot of .NET software sounds really - pardon the expression - 1990s.

The charging formula itself is flawed.

[Neophytus]

£5 per car, per day. The bigwigs on expences who travel in their BMWs will drive through without blinking an eyelid. Mr Bloggs who has to drive in and is on a Teachers salary has to pay the same £5. £150 for 30 days travel is a big dent - up to £1800 a year. The people who need to use the roads (dont ask me why they need to) will be put off. The vans, £40,000 BMWs & limos will drive right through. Surly something is wrong here?

Re:Tubes already crowded

[RussGarrett]

The charge is predicted to raise about £200 ($500) million, which by law must go back into London's transport system. It's a chicken-and-egg situation - they have enough cash problems with the tube as it is, so until they get any more, they can't improve it. All it's problems, however, don't stop the tube being one of the most efficient and extensive city transport systems in the world.

Re:Tubes already crowded

[op00to]

Actually, if you spend any length of time in the Tube, your mucous membranes in your nose will turn black. You'll be constantly flinging black boogers from your nose. As for cleanliness, I've noticed no difference between NYC and London, other than the fact that London closes overnight. And remember, subways don't affect the congestion OR put diesel smoke out to just about head level. Ever see a subway groan off in a huge billowing black smoke cloud?

Probable are illegal, but this isn't:

[Moderation abuser]

http://www.nofiver.com/freelondon.html

Re:Tubes already crowded

[Anonymous Coward]

NY has the most subway cars, the 2nd longest length (after London), 5th higest annual ridership, and is one of the oldest (99 years) and cheapest ($1.50) in the world. Even with that the major stations are the cleanest I remember them and the new trains are bright, clean, and you can actually understand what it is saying. Even the number of beggars seems down.

Good News For Telecommuting

[lanner]

This could be good news for telecommuting. I just wish that more U.S. companies would allow telecommuting. I do not mean 100% of the time, but I could do my job from home just as well as I can do it from work. When I NEED to drive in and do something, I can do it. If there is an emergency, find I can drive -- I will probably miss the rush hours and it won't take me more than 20 minutes to get there. And if it was that important, then why didn't I get the approval to have a redundant system in place?

(ANSWER: because you are our little IT bitch! you have to work 50 hours min every week on salary)

As time goes on, something is going to have to give. More cities, more spread out, new transit systems that do not exist today, or something.

I would take a 10% - 20% pay cut to telecommute, and I mean REAL telecommuting with a Cisco 1750, VWIC, DS1, IP Phone, everything.