Oxford is proposing to introduce a “temporary congestion charge”. If you believe that will only be temporary then you are surely gullible. It would only apply to cars and the charge would be £5 per day. To quote from the proposal: “The scheme is designed to improve bus services and make it easier for those with permits, including community health and care workers, carers, blue badge holders and traders, to travel by car into and around the city”.
How will it make it easier for those people to travel into the City or improve bus services? It would only help if it reduces traffic congestion but such schemes very rarely do so. The unsatisfied demand for road space is so high that the road space quickly fills up.
There is of course no proper cost/benefit analysis in the report and it is just another way to raise taxation on motorists.
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TfL are proposing to raise the London Congestion Charge (a.k.a. tax) to £18 per day from £15 (or £21 if you pay late). There is a public consultation which you can access from this page: https://haveyoursay.tfl.gov.uk/congestion-charge-proposals but don’t expect Mayor Sadiq Khan to pay much attention to the responses.
He needs the extra money raised to fill his budget incompetence. The Congestion Charging scheme was introduced in February 2003 with an initial fee of £5. TfL claim that “Since its introduction the primary objective of the scheme has been to manage traffic and congestion in central London by imposing a charge during the busiest times of day”. This is bullshit of course. It’s always been about raising tax revenue and has not reduced traffic congestion. Like all taxes, once introduced it gradually gets increased over the years without any proper analysis of the benefits or costs.
Changes to electric vehicle and resident’s discounts are also proposed.
Irrespective of the low chance of attention being paid to any responses, please respond to the public consultation. Tell them that there should be a proper cost/benefit justification provided.
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London Mayor Sadiq Khan has launched yet another grab for more power when he already has too much. He is proposing pedestrianisation of the major shopping area of Oxford Street to be done by setting up a new Mayoral Development Corporation which will take over the powers of Westminster Council. This is another blatant power grab by the Mayor which needs to be opposed.
Pedestrianisation of Oxford Street is a good idea in theory but ignores the practical problems associated with diverting bus routes and providing access to cars, taxis and delivery vehicles.
New York Congestion Charging
New York recently introduced a congestion charge to limit traffic in Manhattan and raise money for the local transport authority. But with Donald Trump now in power the Department of Transportation has given New York City a deadline of March 21 to end its congestion pricing plan.
We need someone in central Government in the UK to follow this lead and scrap congestion charges which simply do not work and are just a tax raising wheeze. Local authorities and the Mayor of London should not have the power to raise taxes in this way.
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Transport for London (TfL) have announced the proposed charges for the Blackwall and Silvertown tunnels – the latter is expected to open in 2025. These charges should not be a surprise as they have been planned by Sadiq Khan ever since the Silvertown Tunnel was first proposed.
Are the charges necessary? They have been justified as a way to pay for the cost of the construction of the Silvertown Tunnel. The charge for cars will be £1.50 outside peak hours but will be £4.00 between 6.00 am to 10.00 am northbound or 16.00 to 19.00 southbound. Or effectively £8.00 per day for those who commute daily though the tunnels. There will be discounts for some local residents and businesses and 100% for Blue Badge holders.
I personally use the Blackwall Tunnel occasionally and reducing the queues at the Tunnel by charging is welcomed – but I have to declare a personal interest as I am a Blue Badge holder. One of my concerns is that traffic will be diverted to the Rotherhithe Tunnel which I also use but TfL only forecast a 4% increase in traffic through that tunnel.
But it’s certainly worth reading and responding to the public consultation even though no apparent cost/benefit information is provided or the cost of running a charging scheme. The proposed charges are unlikely to stay at the proposed level for long.
This just appears to many people as yet another money grabbing scheme by Mayor Sadiq Khan. He has reportedly asked the new Government for a doubling of the £2 billion per annum that London gets from central Government to support his plans and maintain public transport in London.
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New York was planning to introduce a congestion charging system. Drivers would pay as much as $15 to enter central Manhattan. The tolls would have raised as much as $1billion for the MTA – the public transport authority – but was strongly opposed by commuters from New Jersey.
Now democrat New York Governor Kathy Hochul has reversed her previous stance and has suspended the planned implementation. She said: “now is ‘not the right time’ to inflict the sky-high tolls on New Yorkers who are already struggling to make ends meet, she said the plan will be tabled indefinitely”.
Comment: This is a sensible decision as congestion charging never works. It never achieves the stated objective of reducing traffic congestion. It didn’t in London which is still one of the world’s worst cities for traffic delays. Despite what TfL and Mayor Sadiq Khan claims, it has not been a success. See https://www.freedomfordrivers.org/congestion . The New York Governor has made a sensible decision. Perhaps she has looked at the evidence.
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There is a TV programme on Channel 4 at 8.00 pm tonight (23/5/2024) entitled “The War on Britain’s Motorists” that should be worth watching. It may cover the poor quality of Britain’s roads and no doubt fixing the potholes will be in every party’s general election manifesto. But will a few more millions of pounds to patch the odd hole really solve the problem? I think not.
Parliament has passed the Automated Vehicles Act which means vehicles with no human driver in charge could be legal by 2026. I am sceptical that this will prove of benefit other than to taxi and minicab services. In London I am not convinced that SatNav systems are good enough to know all the roads well enough to avoid mistakes. We will have to see how this works out.
Shahzad Sheikh has reported that one in four road deaths are caused by drivers or their passengers not wearing seat belts. See https://browncarguy.com/2024/05/21/1-in-4-road-deaths-due-to-no-seatbelt/ . This is not new news to me as it was reported many years ago in my local borough of Bromley. The message is clear. However good a driver you think you are buckling up can help protect you against other idiots on the roads, or out of control driverless vehicles.
The US Embassy is refusing to pay a claim of £14.6 million in Congestion Charge Fees, and some other embassies are also objecting. They claim it is a tax and hence are exempt. Comment: They are right. “Charges” invented by TfL are indeed taxes and they should not pay as foreign embassies are exempt from state taxes.
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The Committee emphasised the need for a simple system if a road user charging scheme was implemented. This committee was chaired by Sian Berry (Green Party) so the result is not surprising but the Conservatives submitted a minority report.,
The Conservative Party have said this in response to the report: “OUR VIEW ON PAY PER MILE: We want to be very clear: The City Hall Conservatives do not support – and will never support – any London Mayor introducing a pay per mile system as an additional tax on Londoners. Sadiq Khan seems to be exploring ever more creative ways to squeeze money out of Londoners, and it’s time to put a stop to it. Implementing Pay Per Mile would be unfair to those who rely on their cars, unfair to those who spent thousands upgrading their vehicles specifically to comply with the ULEZ, and unfair on the pockets of every Londoner”.
That’s probably the view of many Londoners and shows how the Conservatives are gearing up to win the popular vote in outer London.
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The national media have reported that the Government may put back the date when new sales of oil/petrol cars are banned from 2030 to 2035. This is surely good news as it was never a rational policy and was potentially damaging to the motor vehicle production industry which is a significant contributor to UK GDP. But the motor industry is complaining about the lack of consistency which makes it difficult for them to plan ahead.
Meanwhile Sadiq Khan has complained that large sums of money have been spent on twitter campaigns against his ULEZ expansion. He provides no evidence of this which I suggest is extremely unlikely. The campaigns are a grass-roots movement by people affected by the extension and in some cases impoverished.
It also affects many people who live outside London and who are not eligible for the scrappage scheme but need to drive into London for work or other reasons such as visiting hospitals. There is now a new Parliamentary petition which you should sign and which reads: “Give everyone within the Home Counties a vote for the London Mayor”.
It is certainly the case that there is no justice when there is taxation with no representation which is what is effectively happening with the ULEZ as the Mayor penalises people who live outside the borders of his jurisdiction (the GLA area).
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The Government has responded negatively to the Parliament Transport Committee on road pricing with these words: “……. as set out in the Chancellor’s previous letter the Government does not currently have plans to consider road pricing. Given this, the Government does not have further views on the Committee’s recommendations for the ways in which road pricing should be considered. More broadly, as noted previously the Government will need to ensure that the tax system encourages the uptake of EVs, and revenue from motoring taxes will need to keep pace with this change, while remaining affordable for consumers. Our tax system has already begun to adapt to this transition. From 2025, electric cars, vans and motorcycles will pay Vehicle Excise Duty in the same way as petrol and diesel vehicles. The Government will continue to keep all tax policy under review.”
Effectively the Government has ducked the issue again and kicked the can down the road while in London Sadiq Khan is pushing ahead with road pricing schemes.
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We have just passed the twentieth anniversary of the introduction of the London Congestion Charge. This has been hailed as a success by TfL management and Mayor Sadiq Khan but is it? In reality it might have reduced the number of vehicles on the roads of central London as some users have been deterred or changed their travel modes or patterns, but it has not reduced congestion.
This scheme was installed in 2002 to the City and West End with a Western Extension into Kensington and Chelsea introduced in 2007 which was later removed. There is a charge per day for driving anywhere within the zone boundary. This was originally set at £5 per day but rose to £10 at the end of 2010, when the Western Extension was scrapped. It was raised to £11.50 per day from June 2014, and to £15 from June 2020 plus extended to 24 hours per day every day.
The original justification for the charge was that it would solve London’s perennial road traffic congestion (environmental benefits were not an argument used because it was known they would be minimal). But it did not solve the congestion problem with that soon returning to the same level as before and subsequently becoming a lot worse. The environmental claims made by some have also been shown to be false with air pollution within the zone basically unchanged as a result. Neither does it raise any significant funds for public transport improvements because almost all the revenue from the scheme goes in operating costs. Indeed if it was not for the accidental fines people collect from forgetting to pay the charge, it would probably lose money. Note that the Congestion Charge was introduced by socialist car-hating Mayor Ken Livingstone. It has impacted the poor more heavily than the wealthy and hence is a very regressive tax.
The Congestion Charge is of course a remarkably stupid system where the charge is only payable once per day however many times a vehicle drives into the zone or how far they travel. This has encouraged the use of Private Hire Vehicles and taxis which have increased enormously in numbers as a result, thus adding to congestion.
Neither does it encourage low emission vehicles or discourage high emission ones.
Nor does it discourage travel at the busiest times of day as the charge is the same whenever you travel. So there is little benefit in reducing congestion.
Nor is there any concession to people who need to travel within the zone for medical reasons (several major London hospitals lie within the zone and although there is a refund claim system for NHS patients it is complicated to make claims). Nor for any other people who provide essential services such as social carers or plumbers/electricians.
Now the Greater London Assembly (GLA) is holding an inquiry into Smart User Road Charging and are inviting evidence – see https://tinyurl.com/5n8h453s . The Freedom for Drivers Foundation has submitted a response to this inquiry which can be read here: https://tinyurl.com/rryz64hw
If the Mayor pushes ahead with the expanded ULEZ he will have a lot more cameras which could be used to make the Congestion Charge system more intelligent but it can never be made a really sophisticated system without a change in the technology.
There is one thing for certain though. Public reaction to road user charging will continue to be negative as it is just seen as a way to raise more tax from drivers.
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