Congestion charging: How it works in one of the world’s busiest cities
Wellington is considering charging motorists a fee to drive at peak times in busy locations. Have similar schemes been a silver bullet for cities like London? reports.
If you did your OE in London or have ventured there for a holiday, you know what a typical street looks like. Central London is a vehicular street brawl where cyclists, mopeds, buses, taxis, tourist coaches and private cars all vie for space along streets laid down well before the motorcar was even conceived.
Similarly, most of Wellington’s inner city streets were dirt tracks for bullock wagons when they were cut into the hills by British settlers. Cars inch past each other, navigating a city that never anticipated their ubiquity.
Wellington City Council has voted to look at congestion charging in order to both raise income and reduce traffic at rush hour.
But how does it work in other cities? What happened when the most congested city in Europe – London – implemented its scheme? Here’s a bit of context around why driving in central London is a paid privilege.
How does it work?
London has two separate charges for passenger vehicles. To enter the very centre of the city, you must pay the equivalent of NZD$30 (all figures quoted are NZD).
This congestion charge is in place from 7am to 6pm, Monday to Friday, and 12pm to 6pm on weekends and bank holidays. Once paid, a driver can enter and exit the zone as much as they like on that day.
Residents within the zone get a 90% discount and if you drive a moped, motorcycle, EV, plug-in hybrid, a vehicle with more than nine seats, or carry a mobility parking permit, you are not charged.
Fines for not paying after three days are $320 and after a month, it rises to $480.
It doesn’t stop there. Outside the congestion charge zone is the Ultra Low Emission Zone, or ULEZ. For the entirety of Greater London, most petrol cars made before 2001 and most diesels made before 2015 have to pay $24.
Only cars 40 years or older are exempt and the charge is in place 24 hours a day all week.
In essence, to drive a 1995 Toyota Corolla up The Mall to Buckingham Palace will make the driver $54 worse off. And that’s before you get to the eye-watering parking fees.
How do they catch you?
Cameras. Hundreds and hundreds of cameras. At the start of the scheme, 800 ANPR (automatic number plate recognition) cameras at 400 points around the city centre monitored about 250,000 motorists entering the zone. Alongside them is a fleet of mobile camera vans placed around the city to monitor who has and hasn’t paid.
Doesn’t it work only for huge cities like London?
Not at all. The first congestion pricing scheme in the UK was actually launched in 2002 in Durham – an ancient and picturesque university city in northeast England.
Despite having a population of around 50,000 – about the same as Invercargill – the narrow peninsula that makes up the city centre was being swamped by up to 3000 vehicles and 17000 pedestrians per day.
Motorists pay $4 to enter between 10am and 4pm, Monday to Saturday.
Durham County Council reviewed the scheme a year later and found an 85% reduction in traffic and a 10% increase in pedestrians.
The council also found that 70% of residents viewed the scheme positively and 83% of businesses reported no need to alter their commercial arrangements.
One year after its implementation, council leader Ken Manton said the region was now a “much safer and more pleasant place for pedestrians and more attractive for tourists”.
“It looked as though we were on to a winner within a day or two of introducing the congestion charge and the results of our longer-term monitoring, coupled with the awards which the scheme has won, confirm it.”
Why didn’t they just make all those old roads bigger and better?
This was proposed about 50 years ago. And Londoners hated it.
In the 1960s, as car ownership became more accessible and more popular, the newly formed Greater London Council proposed the London Ringways four concentric orbital motorways cutting through the capital’s suburbs.
One of the first stages was the Westway,
Ken Manton
Durham County Council a 4km flyover connecting the London to Birmingham motorway with the newly widened Marylebone Rd.
Once the Westway was completed in 1970, Londoners fully grasped the destruction the Ringways would cause.
The flyover carved through Notting Hill and Ladbroke Grove, splitting communities apart, with a large concrete eyesore looming over the Georgian houses below.
On the day it was opened by Conservative MP Michael Heseltine, residents next to the overpass climbed on to their roofs and hoisted a banner behind him reading ‘‘Get us out of this hell. Rehouse us now’’.
A 1969 study from the London School of Economics also took a dim view of the scheme, calculating that it would displace up to 80,000 households and would leave one million Londoners living 180 metres from a motorway.
The notion that Brixton, Camden, Hampstead and countless other suburbs could soon get their own concrete motorway flyover was unacceptable and a grassroots campaign called Homes Before Roads was started.
The campaign lobbied successfully enough to affect the 1973 Greater London Council election, which brought in a slew of new Labour councillors more sceptical of the Ringways scheme.
The only ringway constructed was the outermost M25 motorway, made up of already constructed sections of Ringways Three and Four that were joined together. It is now one of the top three most congested roads in Europe.
With these roads so deeply unpopular, London had to come up with alternatives.
According to Transport for London’s (TfL) annual report and statement of accounts 2021/22, $865m revenue was generated by the congestion charge.
In a 2018 response to a Freedom of
Information request, TfL confirmed “all net revenue generated by the Congestion Charge since it was implemented in 2003 has been reinvested straight into ongoing investment in the Capital’s transport infrastructure”.
It was required by law that the revenue was ring-fenced for transport investment from the start, although, due to the success of the congestion charge scheme, there were concerns it wouldn’t be enough.
A 15% shortfall in traffic during the first 12 months meant the scheme was at risk of being so successful that it wouldn’t meet its operational costs to the tune of a $130m shortfall.
By 2007, the charge was making revenue and road safety group Transport 2000 estimated 65,000 fewer private car movements than before the charge was implemented, as well as 29,000 more bus passengers.
Why did Londoners accept it?
There was opposition to it at the start. Westminster City Council launched an unsuccessful legal challenge in the High Court, arguing congestion and pollution would increase around the zone’s boundary and that residents in the area would be cut off from healthcare and education facilities.
The scheme had a public mandate from the 2000 London mayoral election won by Labour mayor Ken Livingstone and in 2004, another Labour victory for mayor led to the deeply unpopular Western Extension, which covered Hyde Park, Notting Hill, Kensington, and Chelsea.
The extension was later repealed under Conservative Boris Johnson’s mayoralty.
Hundreds of extra buses and trains were deployed on February 17, 2003 – the day the charge came into effect – and on that day, the Greater London Authority recorded a 25% reduction on road traffic.
Some more creative motorists found ways around the charge, registering their cars as private hire minicabs. For a $164 one-off registration fee and a $54 annual charge, minicabs were exempt from congestion charge.
This meant that, at one time, London had 52 Range Rovers, 31 Bentleys, 8 Rolls-Royces and an Aston Martin DB7 supercar registered as private hire taxis.
The congestion charge was also introduced alongside a promise of major investments in public transport.
The old Routemaster buses that had served London since the 1960s were on their way out for new rolling stock and many of London’s suburban rail services were re-organised and integrated into the
London Overground network.
The Docklands Light Rail had multiple extensions confirmed through the 2000s and the Elizabeth Line was given royal assent in 2008 after years of planning.
Cycle infrastructure was also planned, with a network of dedicated “Cycle Superhighways” planned around the city, coupled with the Santander bike-share scheme.
In short, the congestion charge was introduced alongside a vast investment in options other than private motorcars for Londoners to use.
Could the scheme be called a success?
In a 2006 Transport for London study, the scheme found it had reduced traffic by 15% and congestion-related delays by 30%. The study also found that the reduction in traffic allowed for a smooth redistribution of road space to buses and bicycles.
A separate GLA Transport Committee study from 2017 found that private vehicle trips into the zone had reduced by 39% since 2002.
The introduction of dedicated cycleways has also caused a 66% increase in cycling since the scheme started.
A TfL Roads Task Force report from 2012 also found that while the number of cars registered in Greater London had increased since 1995, carless households had also increased, from 38% to 46%.
It also found that the majority of car owners lived in parts of outer London where public transport service was not as comprehensive.
Equally, a 2017 TfL report found that, since 2000, the number of private taxis had increased by 29%, with a 9.8% increase from 2015 and 2016 alone, when rideshare apps became commonplace.
In spite of road pricing charges, there are large parts of suburban London that are still poorly served by public transport and heavily car dependent.
While there have been efforts to fill these gaps, proposed solutions like the Bakerloo Line tube extension, Thamesmead DLR extension and the Borough of Havering light rail will be decades away, if they go ahead.
“It looked as though we were on to a winner within a day or two of introducing the congestion charge and the results of our longerterm monitoring, coupled with the awards which the scheme has won, confirm it.”
Could all of that work here?
Public transport expert Greg Pollock said Wellington could have a viable congestion charge with the introduction of a few changes.
“Wellington is a public transport city. “We have a great bus network and a great train network, but they're not working as fast and efficiently as they could.’’
Pollock said better bus priority lanes and more frequent services, particularly on weekends, were key to making a charge viable.
Wellington’s buses and trains have faced severe reliability issues in the past 12 months due to staffing and maintenance problems. This has shaken the confidence of commuters in the service.
In order for a congestion charge to work, the Kāpiti and Wairarapa train lines will have to cope with far more suburbanites and out-of-towners parking up and taking the train rather than driving in to the zone.
That is a strain that these services will need to prepare for. Not to mention the vastly increased demand for park-andride facilities.
It would also have to come with the promise of continuously improved public transport alternatives.
Congestion charges worked best when people were given a genuine choice, Pollock said. “The key thing we need to do before we think about congestion charging, is get our bus network working faster so that bus journeys into the city as fast as as a car trip.
“The only way to do that is to have bus priority on the eight key corridors that come in and out of the city and we're not there yet.”
Pollock said those changes could be made in as little as a couple of years.
In the end, Wellingtonians need to get so sick of their own traffic that they flee to other forms of transport – just as Londoners did.