London's disappearing traffic
Date: 2003-04-22
Many great cities around the world are engaged in a deadly struggle with an enemy that threatens them with death by strangulation--traffic congestion! Now, London, England's socialist mayor Ken Livingstone has pulled off an unthinkable coup against the automobile enemy. This past February, London imposed a 5-pound (US$8) toll on private vehicles entering eight square miles of the downtown core. For many, this is an intolerable assault on automobile freedom, and the widely-held idea that if one has an automobile one should be able to drive on any road in the realm, without having to pay for it. Some describe the toll as "elitist." Other feel it can save cities, and preserve automobility for those who really need it--such as delivery truckers and taxi drivers.
Tony Blair's Labor government paved the way for the toll by giving London and other British cities permission to levy such traffic charges, but then carefully distanced itself from the plan. William Hill, one of London's prominent bookmakers, began offering 4-to-1 odds that the scheme would fail by the end of the year. Never-the-less, the scheme is now in force and, if it succeeds, the big brother-like system of surveillance cameras and toll enforcement is a reality that drivers around the world will likely face in the future.
In London, the number of cars entering the toll zone dropped by a remarkable 60,000 the first day (from about 250,000/day), and one automobile group estimated that average speeds in central London had doubled. Mayor Livingstone, declared it ''the best day we've had in traffic flow in living memory.''
However, as the New York Times points out in a recent article, "saturation traffic" is not new. It's been around for decades. Could a Ken Livingstone-type solution work in New York? If it did, then congestion tolls would be a sure thing for traffic-clogged cites and roadways across north America and around the world. But New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg isn't likely to put forward such an idea any time soon, says the NYT article. He's already "spent a career's worth of political capital by raising property taxes to fix the city's enormous budget gap, for example, and by banning smoking in bars, a move that would probably get Livingstone sacked in London." In fact, says the NYT, they don't even like to talk about traffic issues any more.
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