Slashdot Mirror
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.
I thought the tubes (subway) were already over crowded in London? Shouldn't they increase the capacity of public transit before they force people to use it?
UNIX/Linux Consulting
This is true, but the plans, adverts and cameras have been in place for about 6 months by now...
Another exclusive scoop by Slashdot?
Hmm.
sig:- (wit >= sarcasm)
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.
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?
Too damned expensive to take all that real estate by eminent domain, would increase parking requirements requiring even more real estate to be taken, some of it isn't houses, it's office towers, and even then it wouldn't solve the air quality issue. Singapore has AFAIK been doing pretty much the same thing for a while.
As someone here on Slashdot eloquently said, building bigger roads to deal with a traffic problem is like using a bigger belt to deal with a weight problem.
The charge will encourage people to use public transportation.
She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue.
Since people won't be able to drive around the centre of London much less park there they will go and park immediately outside the Congestion Zone which will cause havoc. Fortunately some car parks have already taken note of this and are charging a daily rate of £4.60
Summation 2
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.
For those not in the know, thats 5 pounds of money. Or, for the metrically inclined, its about 2.3 kilos of money. This roughly equates to a metric ass-load.
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
Have you any idea how expensive property in London is? 1/2 millions dollars will only get you a modest 2 bedroom flat in a reasonable area. There is no upper limit on the price of flats in the centre. Trust me, this is not feasable on any scale.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
> 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..).
You picked the wrong time to say that...:) I'm an Urban Planning student. Building more roads is actually worse for your transportation infrastructure because if a road is not congested, more people will use it, and if the road is widened, traffic usually gets WORSE within 1 year than better. (Eg a 10 minute trip with old roads now takes 13-15 minutes). I was recently in london, and there is NO PLACE to build a new road where it is needed most. Also, it is against certain zoning regulations to change the current roads. Also, emminent domain "fair market" is BS for the homeowner. They gov't will never give you as much as it's really worth, because you have no bargaining poisition. If you don't accept their offer, they'll just condemn your house, and you don't get anything! Fun! More roads is NOT the answer -- smart driving, use of public transit, and better services outside the city core would be a more effective way of eliminating congestion in the center than just building more roads, which means more pollution anyhow.
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.
>Why in the world don't they just make the roads bigger?
(I live in London and work in the city center, so I speak from first-hand experience.)
Because London is incredibly crowded and there is absolutely no place for them to put more roads without knocking down houses and buildings.
>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.
And where would they get the money for paying people "fair market value" for their houses? This is London - my small two bedroom flat (in a semi-sleazy part of town) cost over 130,000 *pounds* (over $214,000 at the current exchange rate). Terraced houses easily cross 200,000 pounts in this area of town, and easily over 300,000 pounds in nicer areas. A terraced house is *maybe* 50 feet wide - tops - and is flush up against another terraced house on the other side. You do the math and figure out how much it will cost to put in a *single mile* of new road if you have to knock down a mile of terraced houses to do it. And that's *before* you factor in construction cost.
And don't forget, by the time you get near the city center, you're not talking about knocking down houses, but big, old 5-story stone and brick buildings worth millions of pounds
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.
Al.The Daily ACK - Eclectic posts by yet another hacker
By far the scariest aspect (curiously un-mentioned by the Mayor) is that these cameras will be hooked up to facial recognition software.
In theory, just those covering a small section of London (the financial district) - but I have no doubts this will be extended to cover the whole city in time (after all, it's touted as "automatically identifying suspects or known criminals" so what government in the world would turn down the chance).
I find this far more disturbing - paying to try and alleviate congestion is fine (London is very crowded, and a similar scheme did help alleviate the traffic problems in Singapore when congestion charges were introduced there), paying for the privilege of being treated as a potential criminal is more than a little scary...
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
If commuters are the problem, why not pass a law prohibiting companies within the congestion zone from hiring employees that don't live in the congestion zone? That should take care the problem.
For every problem there is a law that can solve it!
Next?
It doesn't have to fool a human inspector, just an OCR algorithm working on a fuzzy video feed. Just print random license plate numbers on paper in the same font and hold it up in your back window when you pass a camera. You don't even have to drive. Just hold up the papers while you walk by a camera. Might as well see how their .NET servers stand up to a good crap-flooding.
Disregarding the various arguments for and against the "congestion zone" and its implementation for the purposes of decreasing traffic... there's an interesting alternate purpose, apparently. This weekend's Observer describes the dual-use, not only to reduce congestion but also apparently to "protect the city from terrorist attack". Seems to me such a system generates way too much information to be able to "protect" in anything close to real-time.
There's a *known* failure in the system whereby it can't recogise special font plates (only in the process of being made illegal), small motorcycle number plates (even though they're included in the scheme) and it's more than likely that mud, or salt, or cunningly placed black bolts, can make the system mis-fire and log a different number plate to the one you're carrying. There's no real system for ambiguous plates to be checked by hand.
Add in a real problem in the UK with second hand cars still being registered to their previous owners (the new owner is responsible for re-registration, and many don't because it means parking and speeding fines don't reach them) and you have One Hell of a Problem.
I expect civil disobedience.
The technology may be ever so good (though I somehow doubt even that) but it'll be the human element that'll scupper it...
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
As a motorcycle rider, I would like to note that this doesn't apply to two-wheeled vehicles.
As a privacy advocate, I would like everyone to note how full of BS the guys who put up these cameras were when they said the CC cameras would only be used to prevent crime.
Witold
www.witold.org
witold.org
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
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 . . .
Wouldn't it be much more effective, and much easier to tax central-london parking lots/spaces?
Admittedly it's a low-tech solution. Am I missing something here?
I know that would keep ME out (I already take the commuter train and two metros to get to work, because parking is just TOO expensive for me (in Montreal -- not London)).
S
NEED!? What the hell is "need" anyway? You need to get to your job? Maybe what you "need" is a job closer to home?
"Need" gets to be very, sticky, sticky issue subject to political interpretaion.
And of course the shopping areas *need* needless costomers, or their "needed" employees have no "need" to be there in the first place.
Of course what you really have on the road is a *right* of way.
On your mule I guess, because the only ones who could cogently state a viable reason for the *need* to have motor vehicles in the city are police and emergency services in the first place. So the logical thing to do would be to simply close the city to all nonofficial motor traffic.
Works for me, I'm bicycle mechanic and frame builder. I could use the business, and you could use the exercise.
KFG
If your car has been converted to use liquid petrolium gas you dont have to pay. An LPG conversion costs around £1000 so it may or may not be worth it depending on your usage.
Pffft. When was the last time you tried parking in London? 1964? :o)
I don't know where you heard about places charging £4.60 but thats rubbish.
Just because you pay a fiver doesn't mean you're guaranteed a parking space inside the zone. Places outside of the zone are hiking their prices because of the increased demand to park in that area (so capturing the "i'll drive as close as I can and then tube it" group of people).
You can't find a daily rate of less than £20 in the area at the moment. Next week it'll probably hit £25.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
So if you see people walking around London with big signs, something along the lines ofyou'll know what they're trying to do.
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.
That system seems a bit clumsy. It sounds fairly expensive, too.
Not really. Most of the cameras were already in place for traffic-flow monitoring, all it required was a few more to patch up the gaps in coverage and some new software to interpret the images. A smart card system would have required every driver - even those who only drove into London once in ten years - to buy an expensive smart card reader/transmitter. Maybe you can get away with that in Singapore, but forking out money so that you get charged for the privilege? Not in London.
OK so the London government could buy the smartcard reader/transponders but then you're spending far far more on infrastructure than you are on a few hundred cameras, plus you have to work out a way to distribute them. Also it would have been susceptible to tampering - look at the dismal failure that most satellite TV smart card systems are. You could easily have a PC sitting in your car pretending to be a smartcard but failing to deduct any money. Also how do you enforce a smart card system? What happens when a car enters the charging zone without a smart card? You can't have barriers to stop these cars, the whole point of the system is to improve traffic flow, not slow it down, same reason you can't have toll booths. Only way is to have... enforcement cameras everywhere. Real cost saving eh?
Your choice: enforcement cameras plus some relatively cheap software, all centrally controlled and essentially tamper-proof... or enforcement cameras plus several million expensive hardware smartcards and transponders, only limited central control, and prone to tampering.
Smart card/transponder systems work on public transport because there are barriers in the way to stop you if you don't have one or it's run out of money - as a matter of fact London is getting just such a system this year. But for a road system they're simply the wrong technology.
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.