Congestion charging

Times

October 24, 2003

Free way through Livingstone's new traffic zone

By Ben Webster, Transport Correspondent

KEN LIVINGSTONE is planning to double the size of the London congestion charge zone but create a free route through the middle. The Mayor of London also announced plans to test in London a national scheme of charging drivers a toll for each mile they travel via a dashboard-mounted satellite tracking device.

The enlarged zone, which is likely to be introduced in early 2006, would include most of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea and several more wards in the City of Westminster.

Mr Livingstone said yesterday that he would keep the charge at £5 and give all residents of the new zone the same 90 per cent discount. He admitted that traffic was likely to increase in Central London once the zone was enlarged because the number of drivers eligible for the discount would triple.

The existing congestion charge has prompted 50,000 drivers a day to skirt around the zone or switch to another mode of transport, according to a report published yesterday on the first six months of operation.

Mr Livingstone said that it was essential to have a free road through the enlarged zone to prevent thousands of drivers from taking long detours.

The free route will run north-south along Edgware Road, Park Lane, Grosvenor Place and Vauxhall Bridge Road. The Westway, which would run across the northwestern tip of the enlarged zone, would also be free.

Mr Livingstone said that he would fight the mayoral election next June with a manifesto promising to enlarge the zone westwards.

“Londoners will have a clear choice: Steve Norris (the Conservative candidate) saying he would scrap the scheme and me saying I would expand it,” Mr Livingstone said.

He denied that the free route would become a rat run. “There hasn’t been a single rat run created by the existing zone despite all the doom and gloom in Kennington Lane and elsewhere,” he said. “It would be a big mistake for people just driving through Central London to be forced to go all the way around the inner ring road. Therefore we need a route where you can drive straight through without incurring the charge.”

Angie Bray, the Conservative congestion charge spokeswoman, said that the free route would become a “magnet to traffic trying to get from one side of London to the other without paying and could end up negating the supposed purpose of the charge in the first place”.

Mr Livingstone said he had told senior ministers that he would be willing to pioneer satellite-monitored road tolls, probably starting with a few key congested routes such as the North Circular.

Unlike the existing congestion charge, which is enforced by cameras, the tolls would be flexible, varying according to the time of day, the route and the size of vehicle. “We have said to the Government we are happy to go first. We could do it before the end of this decade,” Mr Livingstone said. The Government is proposing to introduce road tolls for lorries in 2006, but it has said that it would be unable to extend the scheme to 25 million cars until after 2010.

Mr Livingstone said that the tolls should be balanced by cuts in other motoring taxes so that the average motorist did not pay any extra.

The congestion charge will raise £68 million this year for investment in transport, only a third of what was envisaged. But Mr Livingstone said that better detection of charge evaders would boost income by between £10 million and £30 million a year.

Road accidents inside the zone have dropped by about 20 per cent and the feared increase in motorcycle and cycle crashes has failed to materialise.

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