London to Introduce Traffic Congestion Charge 643
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.
Tubes already crowded (Score:5, Insightful)
A bit late... (Score:5, Insightful)
Another exclusive scoop by Slashdot?
Hmm.
Re:Not addressed in the article (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Not addressed in the article (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Not addressed in the article (Score:5, Insightful)
The charge will encourage people to use public transportation.
Re:Not addressed in the article (Score:3, Insightful)
This is central London; it's an old city, with really expensive real estate, stuffed full of heritage sites. We're only talking about an area of a few square miles.
Re:Circumvention (Score:2, Insightful)
Facial Recognition (Score:3, Insightful)
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...
Re:Tubes already crowded (Score:3, Insightful)
And impossible. The tube already runs at maximum capacity at rush hour (longer platforms might just possibly cost too much to implement), so that leaves the buses. How exactly do you get buses to travel faster before you reduce the traffic they are caught up in? Get real.
Everybody whines about the charges but they never have a better idea to offer
TWW
Re:Won't work. (Score:3, Insightful)
--dan
interesting "alternative use" (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is... (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
Re:Tubes already crowded (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Circumvention (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, that could be a good thing for revenues. I imagine the fine for obscuring one's license plates to avoid identification is a heckuva a lot higher that 5 pounds, or whatever the US equivalent may be.
My point being that civil disobedience won't cut it. Also, the point here is also to try to effect a beneficial change, not mere revenue.
Tax Parking? (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:5, Insightful)
"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
Re:Tubes already crowded (Score:2, Insightful)
or perhaps dissuade them from using their cars over public transportation by....lets just say CHARGE THEM 5 POUNDS for argument's sake (dont know how i thought of that one...it just came to me). now, the people with the mentality of "if im going to have to sit in traffic, it might as well be in my own car instead of a smelly, crowded bus" will now have to pay for that convienience that is causing this whole mess.....seems like a great idea to me. either do that or set up traditional toll roads.
Firstly, different system, different country (Score:3, Insightful)
PS Burien is a cool place, some LAN party friends live there, and we meet a couple of times a year for Frag Fests.
why 5 pounds? (Score:2, Insightful)
With a fixed price, they can't make the price too high because it would be too painful for
the commoners, and if they charge too low, then the measure is useless.
Re:Tax Parking? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not really. There's practically nowhere to park in central London. The parking that does exist can be very expensive (anything up to £20 per day).
A lot of the time it's people going from one side of London to the other, or just passing through. Hence the wish to "discorage" them.
Re:Tubes already crowded (Score:5, Insightful)
The London tube has a significant disadvantage compared to say the New York subway or Paris metro - London is built on clay. Being built on clay means that for the most part, the tube has to be buried very deep underground. In New York or Paris, the system runs mostly just below the surface. Being deep underground makes engineering work much more expensive, not to mention the fact that they constantly have to pump water out of the system to prevent it from flooding.
Unless people are prepared to pay, and pay big, the tube is not getting any better.
Re:Charge? (Score:2, Insightful)
And what about all the other people that don't use the roads directly, but still benefit from them.
How is your food delivered to the supermarket? How does a fire engine get to your house when it's burning? How does the ambulance get to you when you're dying?
Re:"User Fees" == Double Taxing (Score:2, Insightful)
9 times out of 10 the bridge is supported by the tax structure, and the toll is often just an additional fee that goes into the generic government coffers (i.e. not some specialized bridge maintenance fund). I had a chuckle recently, travelling through one of the rust belt states, having to stop to pay $0.25 to a guy in a booth in the middle of the night, and this covered the next 50 miles or so: I hardly doubt they recoup enough to pay for the guy's wages, much less pay for the highway. As far as Canada, we have a brilliant method for taxing highway use: A gas tax. This actually works very well as heavier vehicles, which do more damage to the highways, generally consume more gas (and hence pay more of a "toll"). If you have a small vehicle and you don't drive much, your "toll" is minimized, but if you have a Ford Expedition and do thousands of KM per week, you will pay your toll accordingly. Sounds like we have anything but a socialist system.
The UK/Canadian system is more socialist - everyone pays a little to spread out the cost
Brrrrr....I am really getting to hate the term "socialist", which is probably the most common hoped-to-be-insult hurled towards Canada by pompous ahole Americans (no I am not calling all Americans pompous aholes. Indeed, the vast majority are nothing of the sort, however being a hyper-power has blessed the fringe of the society with the from-above mandate to set world policy through diatribes in newspapers and online message boards, setting those damn Canucks straight by calling them "Socialists". See the blessed letter by such a whacko in yesterday's National Post [nationalpost.ca]). What makes Canada more "socialist" than the US? That we have universal healthcare, like every single first world nation on the planet but the US?
In 95% of the governmental structure Canada is absolutely no more socialist than the US. In some areas (healthcare) Canada is more "socialist", but in others it is drastically less socialist. The US, for instance, has such incredibly socialist agricultural subsidies that each head of cattle yields enough government dollars to fly them first class around the globe. Countless other industries abound where true capitalism is foresaken "for the common good".
A bit offtopic, however I think the "socialist"/non-socialist titles are just grossly misleading.
It's not clumsy at all (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Thanks Ken.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Most manufacturing industries are already dying, we should be trying to save our high-tech industries too!
Re:Tubes already crowded (Score:4, Insightful)