London, England Mayor Boris Johnson is retreating from his campaign pledge to end the city’s “punishment of motorists.” Johnson’s predecessor, Ken Livingstone, lost his re-election in large measure because Johnson pledged to scale back the £8 (US $13) fee imposed on motorists entering the downtown area. Johnson announced Friday that he will boost the tax to £10 (US $16.40) to shore up Transport for London’s mass transit budget. “The proposed increase in the charge will ensure that the system remains effective in controlling traffic levels in central London, and the revenue will also help us fund the vital improvements to London’s transport network that all Londoners want to see,” Johnson said in a statement.
Transport for London data show that the congestion charge has failed in its stated goal of controlling traffic levels downtown. Documented journey times inside the charging zone in 2007 were the same as in 2002, before the tax was collected, according to a 2008 report. Another, independent study found no reduction in pollution within zone. After accounting for £131 million (US $215 million) in overhead, however, the complicated system did provide transit officials with £137 million (US $225 million) in revenue, which came primarily from late payment penalty tickets.
Johnson’s latest proposal introduces a transponder-based automated credit card payment system designed to significantly reduce the number of penalty tickets issued. Drivers who chose to use the radio frequency tracking device will also save £1 on the tax.
Last month, Johnson reacted strongly to criticism that he has been dragging his feet on his promise to eliminate the congestion charge’s western extension. One of Livingstone’s last moves as mayor was to add the boroughs of Kensington, Chelsea and Westminster to the zone in which drivers must pay the £8 fee. Johnson surveyed residents last year of the 28,000 that responded, only 19 percent indicated support for preserving the extension unchanged. Nonetheless, little action has been taken to drop the extension.
“You may have heard the scurrilous rumor that I have reneged on my promise to remove the western extension of the congestion charge,” Johnson wrote on his website. “We have to jump through a number of tedious bureaucratic hoops before the axe can fall, but fall it will. The extended zone will be no more. It will be an ex-zone, the area formerly known as. It will be a dead zone!”
[courtesy thenewspaper.com]
Boy, it must be hard for people who campaign based on ideology to actually come into power and realize that the way things work is actually much more complicated than their pithy slogans made it out to be.
Some politicians seem to get the point and deal with it. Others will try to cram the world into their ideological viewpoint. The former usually do reasonably well; the latter range from comical to spectacular (in a bad way) to horrifying.
London is a big, dense city. You cannot manage transportation for it the way you’d manage some Welsh hamlet with a population of six, or an American midwest farming town with one-thousandth the density, not unless you think that the resultant complete and utter chaos would be a good thing.
I think the takeaway point of the article is that the congestion charge didn’t have any impact on traffic congestion. More to the point, London (like all governments, it seems) became addicted to the revenue stream and can’t envision giving it up.
Having said that, my brief exposure to the London Underground convinces me that a lot of money could be properly spent repairing it.
The real problem is the underinvestment into London’s infrastructure from the days the Luftwaffe was still involved in its alterations.
The whole traffic system s completely outdated and does not have adequate capacity to cope. This goes for public transport as well as for using your own car.
Te underground has no ventilation whatsoever, neither on the trains themselves, nor on the stations, making it real hell. On top of that it is way below required capacity at peak times, making sure your day is ruined within the first minute, if you have to use it. Similarly, one truly learns to become a Lexus fan here and no wonder most of the lines are all hybrid (all but IS now come in hybrid only varieties) – as the only thing you will really be doing is waiting in standing traffic. Paris, Rome, Berlin, New York and what I have seen of Tokyo are all leagues ahead. Which the lowest traffic speed of any city globally (for London) attests to as well.
The problem is that there is no politician willing and able to pump in the tens of billions to get the infrastructure up to developed world levels, so any promises from either Boris, Red Ken or anyone else do not even need to be listened to.
Taxes, tolls, duties and fees must be addictive. I rarely see any governmental entity willingly give them up.
Perhaps the UK needs a Recall mechanism for elected officials.
Boy, it must be hard for people who campaign based on ideology to actually come into power and realize that the way things work is actually much more complicated than their pithy slogans made it out to be.
But that effectively means lying about what you intend to do as an elected official.
When the parties can say anything to get elected then renege by doing whatever is in the interest of the State, it won’t do much for democracy
We were in London last year. The only advantage of cars/buses/taxis was resting your feet, it sure wasn’t faster than walking. The underground was faster than walking or taking a bus, a lot. Compared to New York, it was clean and quiet. BTW, if you go, the myths about London cabbies are myths.
Yet more proof that Britain keeps getting suckier….
When the parties can say anything to get elected then renege by doing whatever is in the interest of the State, it won’t do much for democracy
They say whatever they want today. The problem is that they’ll either say something incredibly vague, or functionally unworkable.
This is why I’ll generally vote for someone who says “Yes, we’re probably going to have to raise taxes and/or cut services. It will suck, but we have to.” rather than “I’ll make everything better and send you a big cheque in the mail”. The former is realistic; the latter is pandering. The problem is that any fool can say that they’ll cut the congestion charge or whatever, but actually coming up with an alternative that doesn’t piss someone off or cost money in some other way is hard.
Government of a large population is complex and time consuming. Anyone who tells you there’s simple, finger-snap solution is either lying, oversimplifying, or working from a flawed assumption.
This is why I’ll generally vote for someone who says “Yes, we’re probably going to have to raise taxes and/or cut services. It will suck, but we have to.” rather than “I’ll make everything better and send you a big cheque in the mail”.
So you don’t vote very often then? :-)
Congestion charges work!
Anyone who reads the TfL report, or even the article in theNewspaper, will se that the traffic volume in London still is way below what it was before the introduction of CC. That congestion has increased, in spite of lower traffic volumes, depends on the fact that road space has decreased. Partly planned; some road space has been turned from car use to bus lanes or bicycle lanes. Partly unplanned; road works, the building of new houses, sewer reparation works and other things has blocked many roads and thus increased congestion.
The idea of alleviating congestion by building new roads is an illusion. The level of congestion mainly depends on the differences in cost and journey times between car transport and public transport. In central London 90 percent of the commuters use public transport or bicycle, only 10 percent go by car. If road space is increased by new roads that extra space will immediately be filled up with public transport passengers that find that they can save an extra minute by choosing the car. So if you want to decrease congestion you have only two options; increase the price difference between car and PT or decrease the journey times for PT.
Admittedly this should work the other way round also. So it is a little bit of a mystery that the decrease of road space has not been followed by a further decrease in traffic volume. Probably this is due to the fact that much of the road space decrease is temporary and random and thus difficult for people to adjust to.
Björn Abelsson
Transportation planner, Sweden