There are exemptions to the payment for the following: (from here)
“the cameras are filming the cars, not the people”
Perhaps, but I saw on the news once that there are about one Million video cameras monitoring London. I don’t know if this is true or not, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
There have been several links to the Transport for London site. Under Exemptions and discounts it says this (my bold):
Has the news ever told you how many cameras there are in an American city of comparable size/population?
Regarding the use of cameras for watching people…sure, right now they are used to watch traffic. 20 years ago that would have been unheard of. Now being honest, what do you really think the chances are that those cameras will never be used for more than just traffic monitoring, hmmm? Thats the way rights and privacy are taken away, little tiny bits at a time.
The CCTV cameras installed in most British towns are not to watch traffic but are there for anti-crime purposes. This is accepted by most people and they they say they are reassured by them being there. Pehaps this is a cultural difference between the UK and the USA.
Lots of interesting posts here.
More or less everyone is agreed that traffic congestion in London was getting seriously ridiculous, to the point where it took a stupidly long time to drive anywhere in the city during the day, and that something needed to be done. Unfortunately, almost all British politicians are either woefully stupid, or purely in the game to get their snout in the trough and get as privileged a life for themselves and their cronies as possible, or muddle-headed bureaucrats who can talk about problems all the day long day but never actually do anything constructive about them.
Ken Livingstone, the currently elected Lord Mayor of London, doesn’t quite fit this image in the sense that he isn’t afraid to risk unpopularity by actually getting something done. I don’t like the man, in fact I despise him. I think he’s actually a dangerously uninhinged lunatic Leftie, but I will give him credit on this score: he sees a problem, he says what he’s going to do about it, and then he actually goes through and does it. The Congestion Charge is merely the latest in his career of large-scale plans, and he’s hoping it will prove a success.
I for one don’t buy the premise. I don’t think the number of vehicles is the problem. If you stand next to the M1 (our largest and busiest freeway) you can see thousands of cars streaming by every minute. Except in unusual circumstances, there’s no congestion because there’s nothing hindering the cars’ progress. The problem with London is not the number of vehicles, it’s the fact that so many countless obstacles impede the flow of traffic. We have the world’s greatest collection of stupid, unnecessary and frustrating one way systems, No Entry signs, diversions and other ways of interfering with traffic and stopping cars from going where they want to go. We have traffic lights set to idiotic phases which conspire to frustrate the flow. We have all manner of zones and red lines and yellow lines and contra flows and arrows and traffic islands and bus lanes and cycle lanes and you-can’t-do-this and you-cahn’t do-that impediments that it’s a miracle cars ever manage to move at all. The bureaucratic cesspits responsible for all this clutter and street furniture are constantly creating work for themselves by adding more and more obstacles. If you could just cause the lot of them to vanish, and bring some common sense back to the roads, most of the ‘congestion’ would disappear overnight. All we need are the roads, without their lines and zones and arrows and signs, and some sets of lights (set to intelligent phases) and, for other junctions, roundabouts. That’s ALL we need.
The bureucrats, and that includes Livingstone, first of all create the problems, and then dream up solutions which - no surprise - involve extra taxation and revenue. They keep saying that it’s not about raising money. If this were true, they could have achieved the same results very easily without the cameras, the huge IT infrastructure and the payments. Just say 'If the first digit in your number plate is even, you can only drive in to London on even days (e.g. Mon Wed Fri) and if it’s odd only on other days (Tue Thu Sat) with no restriction on Sundays. Leave it to the police and traffic wardens to enforce this by penalising transgressors, and have an optional system to pay a small fee if you want to use your car on a ‘wrong’ day.
The fact is, the Congestion Charge scam is just another self-built edifice to the towering ego of Ken ‘Stalin’s my hero’ Livingstone. It is the wrong answer to an artificial problem which the ‘planners’ created in the first place by putting all their junk schemes on the roads, and it’s just one more way to squeeze extra tax out of the public, in this the most heavily taxed nation in the world.
Is any high-profile company or govt. agency in London experimenting with a four-day work week? I don’t know what constitutes a standard full-employment week for Britons, but in the U.S. that would involve going from five 8-hour days to four 10-hour days. It’d be difficult slogging on the work days, especially for working parents, but could have a significantly reduce traffic if universally implemented.
Can you give an example of a technology that was new twenty years ago and is now used routinely for the state to spy on Americans (or the British if you think you know so much about our country)? Cell phones? If not, why not?
Does anybody posting to this thread think that all cameras should be banned from all public places? Even that camcorder footage you took at Disneyland could be used to pinpoint the location of thousands of people at a certain date and time. I still say that the reason why the congestion charge pictures are no threat to our civil liberties is not because the authorities are saintly paragons of personal freedom but because they don’t have the time or manpower to misuse the details.
There’s a grave risk of this thread drifting into GD territory. Let’s try to steer away from political rants and conspiracy theories about incipient police states shall we? There are many ways that our personal freedoms are curtailed or at risk from the state, and foil hat babbling is just an unhelpful distraction.
Sadly, pretty accurate. (Most long-serving members of Parliament who unthinkingly obey their party leadership get a title when they retire. That seems to be the limit of their ambitions.)
Given he is an independent facing formidable party machines, it is incredible how easily he won the election for Mayor of London. Voters don’t trust the main parties (look at the low turnouts), but don’t often have an alternative.
I’m sorry, but I think this is a pointless comparison.
The M1 was a purpose-built motorway costing about £1,000,000 per mile designed solely to allow fast moving traffic to get access to purpose-built exit roads. Vehicles are not allowed to stop, except in emergencies. (Even so, there are occasional massive tailbacks on such roads.)
London streets were built hundreds of years ago for walking and the modern car traffic frequently wants to stop. There are drivers doing local shopping and school runs, delivery and newspaper vans etc.
Alas, again I disagree. I travel into London in the evenings to play chess. The A1 (not a motorway, but certainly a main artery North) always has miles of traffic queues coming out of London.
The M25 also regularly clogs up in rush hour.
This is purely the number of vehicles. There are no obstacles on either of these roads, yet drivers keep their radios tuned, waiting for the news of a delay on them.
Well that would be wonderful if it were true.
Of course you have a point about local councils dreaming up traffic schemes which slow the motorist. (Although they also have to cope with home-owners and pedestrians, who demand safer roads they can cross easily.)
But, as the M25 showed, if you build a road which is quicker, the traffic will simply increase till the road is frequently full.
I don’t want the police spending time looking at numberplates and filling in forms!
If the fee is too small, or you don’t catch enough offenders, the problem will return.
It may or may not be about raising money (though if it leads to improvements in public transport, we will all benefit), but you have to persuade drivers not to use Central London so much.
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It is sadly true that every State likes to nibble at our liberties.
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This site gives some of the legal obligations of CCTV operators under the European Convention on Human Rights:
http://www.crimereduction.gov.uk/cctv13.htm
- As I already posted:
Hasn’t anyone in America heard of NSA’s ECHELON system?
How much does the US spend on spy satellites, and what democratic control do citizens have over them?
From the site I referred you to earlier:
"There is a network of 203 enforcement camera sites, not just on the boundary of the charging zone, but sited throughout it. Cameras are situated at all entry and exit points to the charging zone. There are an additional 64 monitoring camera sites in central London. They are CCTV-type cameras, similar to those used for ports, airports and the City’s ‘ring of steel’, providing high quality video-stream (analogue) signals to an Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) computer system. Every single lane of traffic is monitored at both exit and entry points to the charging zone. Tests show that there is an estimated capture rate of 85%. "
So the entire London congestion charge monitoring network is 267 cameras.
Where did you get your idea there were a further 999,733 cameras from?
You’ve already claimed payment was on the honor system (!) and was $8.
Your sources seem to be pretty useless.
It’s worth pointing out that speeding up traffic flows does not relieve congestion; it increases it.
The reason is that, while increased speed means that journey times (and therefore the amount of time a given car needs to be on the road) are reduced arithmetically, it also means that stopping distances (and therefore road space requrements per car) increase logarithmically. The advantage of having each car on the road for a shorter time is more than offset by the disadvantage that each car requires more roadspace.
Thus a road which carries cars at a steady speed of 40 mph will become congested at lower traffic volumes than if it carried cars at a steady 20 mph.
Congestion reduction measures should therefore be aimed at reducing traffic volume, or traffic speeds, or both.
So what is the CBD?
And how feasible is five pounds a day, compared to bus or train fare?
CBD is ‘central business district’ and is basically the generic name for the cental area of any city with a large population.
Your second question is dependant on which zone you are travelling from, so will leave it for a local Londoner to answer.
Any Londoners care to comment on the success of the system for the week? (I know it’s still half term).
" BBC London’s Online Jam/web Cams
Avoid the queues - check out the traffic before heading out onto London’s roads.
We have 160 traffic cameras online across London. The images come from Transport for London’s traffic CCTV network."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/london/travel/jamcams/
Might be up or down, but hey, it’s fun to see what things really look like around that area.
For bus journeys, London is divided into two zones. Journeys within the outer zone cost 70p, those into or within the inner zone cost £1. You can buy season tickets at a reduced price.
For train journeys, London is divided into six concentric zones. Zone 6 covers places as far away as Heathrow Airport and the congestion charge area roughly corresponds to Zone 1.
[ul][li]If you make a single journey between Zone 6 and Zone 1 it costs £3.70 and a Travelcard (unlimited journeys) costs £10.70 for peak time or £5.10 off peak. There are reductions for season tickets, though. For example a monthly Travelcard works out at £4.70 per day.[/li]
[li]If you make a single journey between Zone 2 and Zone 1 it costs £2.00 and a Travelcard (unlimited journeys) costs £5.10 for peak time or £4.10 off peak. A monthly Travelcard works out at less than £2.50 per day.[/ul][/li]So if you commute, or take similar distance journeys every day it pays you to plan ahead. There’s a nominal saving on the congestion charge if you’re travelling by tube over the longest journeys but it gives a 50% saving for short journeys. I got the figures from this document (PDF format again I’m afraid).
To be slightly pedantic about everton’s numbers - as someone who has a Zone 1-2 monthly season ticket in my wallet - the congestion charge doesn’t apply on weekends, so for someone commuting between Zone 2 and Zone 1 the relevant cost of a monthly Tube ticket is £3.75 a day rather than £2.50. If you wanted to drive into Zone 1 on weekends, you wouldn’t pay anything. Except, of course, you wouldn’t: the cost of parking - either on the street or in a commercial lot - is non-trivial in central London.
And, equally, on weekends, or indeed on weekdays, a Tube season ticket holder may make multiple spontaneous free journeys. But that’ll depend on personal habits.
To add just one more thing to Glee’s excellent comments on Ianzins posting; the alternative suggested of only allowing odd or even numbered plated cars into the CBD on alternate days was tried - in Athens - and was a dismal failure. All that folk did was to buy yet another car carrying the opposite plate and use them alternately. Now the one thing the streets of Highgate does NOT need are another few hundred cars looking for a parking spot…
San Paolo in Brazil I think tried another alternative - fining any car carrying only the driver to encourage car share. The resulting growth industry in “professional passengers” was fasinating - the poor (no shortage) simply buses out to beyong to charging zone and charged drivers to hitch back in again with the process endlessly repeated during the two rush hours.
Liverstone has lots of faults but at least is a democrate - unlike Stalin as far as I recall. That he is an arch-egotist and an alleged wife beater are different issues…