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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.
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.
--- Ban humanity.
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.
I'll assume these are illegal in London, yes? If not, I plan on buying stock in any UK based company that makes these.
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.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
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.
Diplomacy is the art of saying "nice doggie" whilst looking for a rock
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.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
> 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..).
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.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
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!)
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.
.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
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 !
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
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.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
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.
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.
The requested URL
If you use the correct type of fuel (I think it's Diesel) then you become exempt from the Congestion Charge.
Summation 2
That system seems a bit clumsy. It sounds fairly expensive, too.
.NET software sounds really - pardon the expression - 1990s.
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
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.
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?
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.