WRITTEN ON September 1st, 2005 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Pertinent Art, What do we want?, Wibbipedia/MindtheGap
If I want to drive my dull little estate car through a London street (eg to collect son, buy school uniform and drive home) there’s a little ritual that’s required. It goes like this (see text below heartwarming image from Banksy).
I stop off on the way to the car at Bloomsbury Food & Wine newsagents, where they now know me well. I pick up a newspaper, and ask to pay the outrageous and evil congestion-charge rip-off tax please. They type some numbers into a yellow box, take my money and I dont get fined. We share a dislike of the whole system – the proprietor makes such a small margin on it. But we have a chat while we wait for the system to respond. I pay £8.65, and all I get to take away is a newspaper. I then drive approx 60 yards to the relative freedom of roads which don’t have this extra restriction (just speed limits, parking controls, cameras, tax requirements, one way streets and all sorts of other bossiness). And traffic jams.
The advantage of paying the £8 is you dont get an obnoxious letter demanding £80. So this is an expensive process, which works quite well. There’s a proliferation of sinister camera gantries, vans with blacked out windows and bossy signs on the streets. And London is a more expensive and less desirable place to visit with one’s car.
Which is precisely the purpose. This whole ritual is a Good Thing for people who ride bicycles, walk (as I mostly do in London), breathe air, and enjoy lower noise levels. The city streets still feel car-oriented and there’s plenty of traffic, but less.
The user take of the whole congestion charge experience is at three levels:
1. To the user it’s intrusive, threatening, mildly inconvenient, bossy and expensive. The only benefit of remembering to do it is that it spares you greater abuse from the same bureacratic machinery. At that level it was a daft idea and least harm would be now to abolish it.
2. The Londoner enjoys milder traffic conditions. At that level it’s a partial success, and we want more.
3. It increases the cat’s cradle of bossiness, intrusion and surveillance in a way which is depressing to work out and it is thankless – indeed hopeless – to resist. One looks for other ways to “take it out” on bureaucratic authorities – graffiti, vandalism, petty avoidance, FoI aggression, being rude to innocent call centre staff, protest. At that level while approving the intention we wish it had been implemented differently.
Wibbi….the City was pedestrian and public-transport friendly, and we had good grounds to be confident this policy wasnt being used for irrelevant mass data retention. And we had invisibility cloaks for our number plates and could put two fingers up to the system.
Afterthought – apparently there’s a growing trend of buying old bangers, registering them wrong and driving them for a few months, chalking up massive speed, parking and congestion charge fines then abandoning them. It’s quite cost-effective, I gather. Anyone know more? Or is this urban myth?
4 Responses to “What it’s like paying the London congestion charge”
My own personal CCG joy is a consequence of having to drive from Hackney to the Portsmouth ferry regularly, and it goes something like this.
Aim for the afternoon or evening ferry, get snarled up in traffic (I can’t say I’ve noticed it become more pleasant), miss ferry, wait six hours at port for next one. OK, take morning ferry instead. Leave two and a half hours ahead at weekend, catch ferry. Leave two and a half hours ahead weekday, get snarled up in traffic that’s coming in early to skip CCG, miss ferry. OK, leave three and a half hours early, miss CCG-skippers, arrive hour and a half too early for ferry. Nnngggg…
IMO, the whole thing is shot, is Ken’s cunning stunt to avoid contemplating an integrated transport and roads policy for the whole London area, and simply adds a tax onto the wholly unpleasant experience of driving into a small part of central London.
Re the banger myth. I’m not sure that those doing it need to consciously be doing it for it to be true. Consider the economics of the motor industry, which require that customers for new cars refresh their vehicle every three to five years or so, and the treadmill aspect of the secondhand car market that induces customers to cash the car before it becomes worthless, and to aspire ever upwards.
This results in approximately serviceable vehicles being sold second, third or fourth hand for £100-£1,000, and virtually nowhere in this bracket is it cost-effective to conduct serious repairs. Result? Greater pollution from semi-serviceable vehicles, high level of dumping at the bottom end, and a situation where people with little disposable can afford £200 for a car that just about works, but where the tax, MoT (probably not possible anyway) and insurance are prohibitively expensive.
It seems to me the obvious but hard solution is to somehow break the motor industry refresh cycle. If new cars were cheaper and held value better throughout their life, then the industry would sell fewer of them, there’d be less untaxed crap on the roads, etc etc. And less people employed in the global motor industry. Hmm… tricky. (-:
The way they’re going to fix that (not) instead is by even more gantries, automated systems to snag the defaulters, more systems to identify and locate them (ID, your address on file), etc etc.
Which will likely be simply other ways to keep data on those of us who are clearly identifiable and inhabit known locations, while missing practically everybody else. The invisible number plate, BTW, I read in the Sunday Times as being achievable via a coat of cheap (has to be cheap) hairspray. I’m far too law-abiding to check to see if it works. (-:
Come on you petrolheads. As someone who has never had a car, lives in the suburbs and works in central London, close to St Paul’s, I can only say that the congestion charge has made life a hell of a lot better. It is a justifiable tax — the streets are more civilised. I suppose there is a data-friendly way to administer the same rules — guards with red and white barriers collecting money — but given that the problem was that central London was getting completely congested by private cars (does son refuse to use buses or tubes, William?) the congestion charge is a wholly reasonable and effective solution. And the sooner it can be extended, the better, say I. But I don’t expect you to agree.
Alan B-G
I’m a resident of a street just inside CGZone & second Alan B-G suggestion that these yummy mummy’s & daddy’s get their little darlings into the habit of using public transport PDQ.
Doubtless they’re the self same kiddiewinks who are ballooning due to lack of sound nutrition and physical activity. Doubtless these mums & dads are laying awake at night worrying what pollution little Jocasta or Ethan may inhale as they dash from the dull little estate car or (more likely in ECI anyway) Range Rover to the school gate.
To drive in Central London is a choice – with consequences. The upside for the driver is greater personal comfort, perhaps a little time-saving. He and his passengers forego some healthy exercise and the opportunity to engage with others at a human level (maybe thank the bus driver, help another passenger on or off a tube train or offer directions to a fellow traveller).
Consequences for us all is pollution in all its forms, depletion of scarce resources and global warming.
It seems those with children are particularly prone to schizophrenia when it comes to these choices; unwilling to accept a little inconvenience despite totally justified concerns over environment and health. If we all accept our responsibility to reduce our personal carbon footprint global benefits come to us all.
A correspondent writes…
FWIW, my personal WIBBI on congestion charge:
– it’s infuriating when you collapse back into hearth and home after a sortie into the Smoke, and forget all about paying the charge. After 10pm or midnight or whatever, you are doomed
– WIBBI you had an option to pay double the next day (kind of a morning-after pill) – still a lot better than £80, and the extra admin costs for TfL should be covered by the increased charge, and only slow down their penalty operations by one day. Of course, they may see their penalty revenue
plummet, since I suspect many non-payers would take up this offer….