Photograph: Graeme Robertson
From Boris Johnson's transport strategy:
In the life of the strategy, the Mayor may consider road user charging schemes if other measures at his disposal are deemed insufficient to meet the strategy's goals and where there is a reasonable balance between the objectives of any scheme and its costs and other impacts.
It's point E21 in the executive summary - see page 19. Similar material was present in previous mayor Ken Livingstone's transport strategy too. Some London Conservatives and Ken-haters, who'd convinced themselves that Transport for London was a conspiracy of Communist vegetarians, leaped upon this as proof of hidden agendas to ban go-faster stripes, cross-dress Mondeo Man, nationalise the Victoria sponge and so on.
Such screams of outraged discovery have not been repeated under Ken's successor, despite the existence of point E21. This is unsurprising. Boris has cut the congestion charging zone in half and made plain his view that extending it to the suburbs would be "a blatant tax on the motorist." Please note in passing that Boris calls the C-charge a "charge" when he's feeding the media tales of billing Obama for his embassy's poor manners, but a "tax" when he's thinking of ballot boxes in Bromley.
But whatever it's name, he's against more of it. And so, for now at least, is Ken who has ruled out bringing back the western extension that Boris - in the end rather reluctantly - abolished should he re-take City Hall in May. This a sad state of affairs given that estimates of the annual cost of congestion to London's economy range from £2 billion to £4 billion and that it is calculated that 4,000 Londoners a year die prematurely as a result of poor air quality generated mostly by road traffic.
The report commissioned by the London Assembly's Greens published last Friday is therefore very welcome. Compiled by Professor John Whitelegg, it is called Pay-as-you-go: managing traffic impacts in a world-class city, and takes as its premise that Boris's ambition to make London the "best big city in the world" cannot be released unless its road traffic is controlled more effectively.
The report reviews research which has found congestion charging effective wherever it's been introduced and looks at technological advances that would make a London-wide pay-as-you-go road pricing system technically possible. It addresses the problem of selling such a radical idea to the public as follows:
Public support is very closely linked to concepts of fairness and equity. In the context of London with millions of trips being made by public transport, walking and cycling it is self-evidently fair to levy a charge on the much smaller number of car trips that cause a much larger environmental burden than non-car trips. If that revenue is then deployed for the benefit of all Londoners and for a cleaner, greener London then that is likely to win and retain public support.
This may seem madly optimistic in view of recent public rejections of congestion charging in Manchester and Edinburgh, an issue explored by a man from London Travelwatch at the City Hall launch of the report. He reminded us that mayor Livingstone introduced charging in the face of opposition from everyone from (surprise, surprise) the Evening Standard to his own advisors and that not every politician is as single-minded and ready to take big risks as Ken.
Still, as the report points out, road pricing is unusual in that it unites economist concerned with efficiency, enivronmentalists concerned with pollution and CO2 emissions, and social justice campaigners who want transport policies that help women, children and those on low incomes. There is also the question of London's need to raise money in the age of austerity. Professor Whitelegg reaches the following conclusion:
The revenue benefits of a London-wide pay as you go scheme are substantial and it is highly unlikely that the objectives of the Mayor's Transport Strategy can be achieved in an era of declining public finance, rising costs of supplying and maintaining public transport operations and no significant increase in revenue from road pricing.
Put in very clear language it is our view that a London-wide road pricing scheme is essential and without it congestion will worsen, air pollution will worsen, the legal consequences of failing to meet air quality standards will grow in severity and fall on the GLA, the health of Londoners will suffer, CO2 reduction targets will be missed and London will stand no chance whatsoever in achieving "best in class" status that it so richly deserves.
Read the whole report here.
From Cyclists in the City
From The London Word
Comments
22 December 2011 12:17AM
Last time I went to London the traffic was appalling. How Londoners cope with that is beyond me - most places are within reach of public transport, walk-able, or in the main the land is flat and its very conducive to cycle.
If other deterrents towards unnecessary driving (10 miles and under) are not working then yes, a congestion charge would seem the most effective means of reducing congestion, noise and pollution - all factors London is failing to deal with.
22 December 2011 5:40AM
There won't be any roads or congestion left once Cameron and Gideon are finished
Boris is done for in the coming year so he is only a problem for a few months more.
22 December 2011 7:05AM
Pay-as-you-go scheme - with eminently sensible as it's attitudes towards driving that have to change: from the currently dominant one of a socially cost-free activity/individual 'freedom' 'right' etc to one which recognises the impact on others as well as the environment. Being made to pay for the privilege of driving should help that shift.
But a car-free zone 1 should become an essential part of making London a 'world-class city'. Ken's political boldness in opting for congestion charging in the face of the gainsayers is what's needed again. Perhaps this could become a cross-party initiative. Random vox pops on the city's streets/buses shows support for such a move.
Meantime @downfader refreshingly reminds us of the noise created by motorised traffic, so often ignored in environmental and health assessments of road transport.
22 December 2011 7:29AM
Most pollution in the UK comes from buildings, especially innefficient older buildings, so lets place a massive increase in community charges to pay for the pollution that buildings contribute to the environment. particularly targetting older more run down properties with single glazing, and ancient / electric heating systems as these are the main culprits.
22 December 2011 7:38AM
We also need to place massive tax increases on diesel buses, taxi`s and hgv`s which are delivering goods in the capital, as vehicles of this type are the main polluters in the area of transportation.
22 December 2011 9:03AM
The sort of major social change required has happened with smoking. Once it was deemed "healthy" to smoke as it is now to drive. The trouble is it took about 50 years and thousands of deaths to change this in the public view, and no doubt jeremy clarkson loves smokers!
22 December 2011 10:51AM
Given some of the advantages of London, such as the enormous Underground system, it's really pretty outrageous transport is such a problem. There's no doubt traffic has to be culled; the problems of safety, parking and pollution alone make a change inevitable. London has 707,000 cars (more cars than most British cities have people) so anyone in their heart-of-hearts must know there is a day of reckoning to come. The gains in health, time, lack of accidents, economic benefits and reclamation of so much land for parking make a truly compelling argument.
22 December 2011 11:08AM
The problem with cycling is that the speed limit (30 mph) is set for cars, even though the average speed in London (12 mph?) is very low. Because cyclists cannot keep up with the short periods of high speed, they end up forced off the road. Cycle lanes and cycle paths, for good reasons, do not restore the balance.
As a nation, we need to ask - what should the urban speed limit be? I will suggest 15 mph, if cycling is to be the new default form of transport.
Then, and only then, should we consider congestion charging - it is what happens when nothing else works. It is not really an achievement.
22 December 2011 11:16AM
Are the Grauniad's proofreaders on strike?
22 December 2011 11:16AM
Tussyisme:
Superb comment. Private motor vehicle driving and ownership must be made as socially reprehensible and in need of being suppressed as smoking has been.
Driving was never, ever a civil right, the impression that it might have been is simply propaganda by the car lobby and its advertisers. The <freie Buerger, freie Fahrt slogan in Germany has been killed off, we need to eradicate its analogues here.
22 December 2011 1:21PM
We must also place punitive taxes on old inefficient buildings with single glazing and old innefficient / electric heating systems, as these are one of the main producers of pollution in cities, also diesel buses taxis and HGV`s delivering goods and food into cities
23 December 2011 12:36PM
The future solution would be UK wide road pricing, but that is some way off.
In the mean time the best solution is to reduce the amount of parking available, as if you can't park somewhere you aren't likely to drive there.
The hostility to any change to parkin will always be high. Take for the example of the proposal of Westerminster to restrict off-peak parking in central London (at the request of residents who were fed up of not being able to park as so many people drove into the west end in the evening). The Evening Standards campaign against it made it sound like the west end would collapse without free parking (for the few) when most people working/going there use public transport.
23 December 2011 1:39PM
There is already a pay-as-you-go scheme. It's called fuel tax and it brings in £25 billion annually into the governments coffers. It more than doubles the price of fuel. Not hard to miss.
23 December 2011 3:51PM
It's fundamentally wrong to levy a road tax and in addition charge people to drive in cities too.
I don't drive or own a car.
24 December 2011 4:49AM
I'm interested what right or moral precept is violated by using the pricing mechanism to discourage particularly damaging car journeys, Nickthelight.
24 December 2011 2:00PM
In order for road use taxes not to be an injustice, they must be collected
anonymously so that they are not an excuse for orwellian surveillance.
24 December 2011 5:26PM
There hasn't been a "road tax" for 74 years. You are probably thinking of VED which is essentially a tax on CO2 emissions. Driving in cities leads to congestion and toxic emissions so a tax to discourage it is perfectly sensible.
24 December 2011 5:58PM
You say fuel tax brings in £25 billion. The cost of motoring to the economy is much more than that.
25 December 2011 8:49PM
This was Leninspart's unpublished policy in 2008.
Why do you think that Ken brought in the Supplemental Tolls bill? It gave TFL the right to toll all main roads in greater London and to stick up overhead cameras anywhere they wanted.
A legal boundary for Greater London was also created for the scheme.
The big problem is the tech. The C-Charge system is so crude and needed so much manual effort by people in a Coventry shed, that the profit was 25p per car per day. Good job the fines were huge, though that get-out has been closed off with Boris's account system, as used in Stockholm.
The truth behind this idea is to create a big enough revenue scheme to make bus travel free, or nearly free. And that revenue would come mostly from vehicles arriving from outside London. So the drivers can't vote Lenin out.
It is nothing to do with 'pollution' (if you call CO2 pollution) and everything to do with the old Lefty canard of finding new ways to re-distribute money from the 'rich' (ie, drivers and businesses from outside London) to the poor (ie people who use London buses).
Won't work, like C-Charge never raised anything like the sums it should have done.
26 December 2011 11:51PM
er...no.
I completely agree that a 15mph urban speed limit is a hugely desirable idea as is the idea of a car free central London - but there is no denying the urgency and proven effectiveness of congestion charging - there simply has to be action taken on behalf of those whose lives are shortened, shattered, endangered by the ongoing menace of car users - whose backward ideas about their 'right' of 'freedom' to motor about as they think fit is exactly the same freedom written into the US constitution - 'the right to bear arms'.