NINE months after London started to charge motorists for driving in the city centre, the leaders of the world’s cities are falling over themselves to see if they can repeat London’s trick of cutting traffic jams. “We have been inundated with requests to talk to people. It’s just been incredible,” says Michelle Dix, who is the joint head of congestion charging at Transport for London (TfL).
It is easy to understand the excitement. For nearly a hundred years the world’s city dwellers have been trapped in a vicious circle. Every year more and more cars crowd onto the roads. The jams get worse. Buses get snarled up in the jams and become unreliable, so even more people opt to drive.
“Cities can’t function properly having people stuck in congestion unable to get in or out of the city,” says Stephen Glaister, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Imperial College London and a member of the TfL board. “Congestion charging is the sensible way of doing things,” he says.
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The idea of charging motorists to drive in city centres isn’t new. Singapore was the first city to start congestion charging in 1975. In 1991, Trondheim and two other Norwegian cities adopted congestion charging as a way of raising money for new roads. Although these schemes successfully cut traffic, politicians in other countries have been reluctant to follow suit for fear of electoral unpopularity.
“It was a question of finding someone with the political courage,” says Derek Turner, who designed London’s scheme. Enter Ken Livingstone, London’s mayor and the man responsible for introducing congestion charging. Since 17 February motorists have had to pay £5 to drive in central London on weekdays or risk a fine of £80 if they fail to pay.
The charge has brought about a dramatic change in the way people travel in the city centre. There are now 50,000 fewer cars entering central London every day, a drop in traffic of 16 per cent. Because traffic is moving more freely, car journeys in the zone are now 14 per cent quicker than they were before the charge. Buses too are now more reliable. The extra time that people have to wait at bus stops, because their bus is caught in a jam, has dropped by 60 per cent.
Most of the people who no longer drive into central London now take public transport, some are cycling and a few – about 4000 a day, according to TfL – just don’t make the journey any more. Many of the problems that were predicted, such as traffic chaos on the boundary of the charge zone as people tried to avoid paying, have not materialised.
But on top of reversing the decline of public transport, Turner says, is the added bonus “that you are generating income which can be invested in public transport”. This year TfL expects congestion charging to earn £68 million. The success of the scheme has helped to silence critics and last month Livingstone announced a modest expansion of the charging zone.
The next city to adopt congestion charging will almost certainly be Stockholm. Turner, who left TfL to become a private consultant, is advising Stockholm on how to start its scheme, which will begin in 2005. A host of other cities is also likely to follow suit, including Lisbon, Paris, Milan and New York, not to mention a number of cities in Japan and South America.
Smarter weapons to tax away traffic
In London drivers have to pay a flat-rate charge of £5 whenever they enter the zone on weekdays between 7 am and 6.30 pm. When people pay the charge, their car registration number is recorded. Cameras surrounding the city centre spot the number plates of cars entering the charging area, and anyone whose number is recognised but hasn’t paid by the end of the day is fined.
The system has to charge drivers as they cross the cordon while also detecting those who live inside it, a problem that will become more important as the charging area grows. But other charging schemes could be more flexible, allowing charges to vary from street to street, by time of day and even by type of vehicle.
There are several potential technologies, says Phil Blythe, a specialist in electronic charging at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in the UK. Microwave communication at 6.5 gigahertz, linked to a transponder and smart card in the vehicle, could automatically deduct charges from an account paid for by drivers as they pass roadside beacons.
A second option, Blythe says, is to use GPS satellite positioning to track vehicles, a system already used in Switzerland to charge heavy lorries for the distance they travel. But tall buildings can block GPS signals in city centres. And Stephen Glaister warns of the danger of a major source of income being subject the demands of the US military, which builds, launches and runs the GPS satellites. “You wouldn’t want it suddenly switched off,” he says.
Another promising suggestion avoids that problem by using third-generation mobile phone networks, which can locate a user to within 15 metres, to charge motorists.
It’s not yet clear which, if any, of these technologies will win out. “I think that in 10 years’ time you’ll see a combination,” Blythe says.
