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.
Not addressed in the article (Score:0, Interesting)
Charge? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Circumvention (Score:3, Interesting)
If the government is that strapped for revenue, then they should just raise taxes on the wealthy.
Have you ever been to London? (Score:4, Interesting)
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 (Score:1, Interesting)
What about anti-photographic measures? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Not addressed in the article (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Not addressed in the article (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Getting Around It (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Not addressed in the article (Score:4, Interesting)
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..).
Just to be absolutely clear.. (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:3, Interesting)
.NET - ha (Score:5, Interesting)
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 !
LCD shutters for license plates (Score:5, Interesting)
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. [pipstechnology.com]
becomes unfair (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Tubes already crowded (Score:3, Interesting)
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 (Score:1, Interesting)
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 (Score:3, Interesting)
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 (Score:3, Interesting)
Why such a clumsy system? (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re:What about anti-photographic measures? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
The charging formula itself is flawed. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Tubes already crowded (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Charge? (Score:3, Interesting)
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
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.
Re:Tubes already crowded (Score:4, Interesting)
Probable are illegal, but this isn't: (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.nofiver.com/freelondon.html
Re:Circumvention (Score:1, Interesting)
This is a non endorsable offence in the UK.
Re:Tubes already crowded (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:.NET - ha (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Not addressed in the article (Score:2, Interesting)
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.)
Good News For Telecommuting (Score:5, Interesting)
(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.
Re:Are you nuts? (Score:3, Interesting)
Wouldn't it be possible to damage the camera? Yes it goes back and forth, but it still seems to me that a group of people could take these things out.
Call the group a "well armed militia"