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Life in the Faster Lane

How London Car Curbs Inspired U.S. Cities; Clamping the Mercedes


On his way to a play one evening, Merrick Cockell parked his car on a back street on the edge of the theater district. He sat in the car for 10 minutes. At 6:31 p.m., he put his key in the ignition and drove into the city to see "The History Boys."

Why the wait? Anyone driving through central London during the day must pay a &pound;8, or about $16, "congestion charge." "I wasn't prepared to pay eight quid for the pleasure of being five minutes early to the theater," says Mr. Cockell.

WSJ's Aaron Patrick talks to Londoners about levying taxes on cars entering the city to reduce traffic congestion.

London Mayor Ken Livingstone introduced the fee in 2003 to relieve the city's traffic jams, and expanded the zone in February. Since its introduction, the congestion charge has reduced traffic, prompted people to use public transportation and cut pollution.

Now, a number of U.S. cities including Dallas, Miami, Minneapolis-St. Paul and San Diego are considering congestion charges on busy roads or highways. San Francisco is discussing a congestion charge for its downtown, one of the busiest traffic zones in the country. Officials from the San Francisco County Transportation Authority have been to London numerous times to study its scheme, says Tilly Chang, the authority's deputy director of planning.

London's plan was also the model for New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's proposed $8 fee for cars south of 86th Street in Manhattan between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. Yesterday, the city reached an agreement with state legislators to create a committee to conduct hearings and study how to implement the plan, along with any other anti-congestion proposals, and will need final sign-off from the state legislature early next year. The project is dependent on receiving at least $200 million in federal funds, although the city hopes to get $500 million. Mr. Bloomberg said in a statement the city would "begin immediately to prepare for the installation of needed equipment to make our traffic plan a reality."

Several other international cities have introduced similar schemes, though none have been on London's scale. Since 1975, drivers in Singapore have paid to enter busy parts of the city during the day, which made traffic move faster during peak hours and encouraged people to share cars. Oslo and Stockholm charge for access to their city centers. In Santiago, Chile, drivers must pay more to drive on popular roads at busy times.

In 2006, about 60% of Londoners said they support the congestion charge, up from 40% in 2002, according to Ipsos Mori, a polling company. In 2004, Mr. Livingstone was easily re-elected over a Conservative, Steven Norris, who promised to scrap the charge.

But the zone is changing routines and creating new ones, becoming one more factor in the complex series of calculations that urban dwellers make every day. Parents ask where their children's friends live before agreeing to play dates, to see if they will have to drive through the zone. Expectant mothers pay before driving to the hospital.

Rebecca Nicolle, an interior decorator, decided her daughters, Dora, age 9, and Mamie, 7, needed to start taking the public bus to school by themselves this year because it was too expensive to pay to drive them. She practiced with Mamie and Dora for three weeks before allowing them to go on their own. The girls thought it was an adventure. On their first day solo Ms. Nicolle fought back tears.

"The school was really good about it," Ms. Nicolle says. "They would ring me to say they got there OK."

When the private Charles de Gaulle School in South Kensington suddenly found itself in the newly expanded zone, the parents' association appealed to the government for an exemption for parents dropping off their children at school. The request was rejected, says Katherine Cecillon, president of the association.

Some families are car pooling, she says. For parents who pay every day, it costs about $2,050 a year to do the school run.

One real-estate firm, W.A. Ellis, bought its staff motor-scooters, which are exempt from the charge, and paid for rider training courses and riding jackets and boots, so it wouldn't have to pay the charge for its employees.

London, with its narrow, winding roads, laid out centuries before the automobile was invented, has long been highly susceptible to traffic jams. In 1981 Mr. Livingstone, in his first period as leader of the London council, cut bus and train fares sharply to encourage people to drive less. The move prompted many Londoners to swap cars for public transport. But a legal challenge against the change was successful and fares soon went up again.

By 2002 a poll paid for by London Council found traffic congestion was residents' No. 1 complaint with the city, above housing costs and crime. The average city driver spent 3&frac12; minutes sitting still or driving slowly for every mile they traveled. Buses going through the city averaged 6.8 miles per hour, a similar pace to the horse and buggies used in London 100 years ago.

The toll cut the number of vehicles entering the city 16.4% since 2002, to 316,000 a day in 2006, as more people walked, rode and took buses and trains instead, says Transport for London, the government agency that administers the program. The average driving speed rose to 10.5 miles per hour in 2003 from 8.7 miles per hour in 2002. The city is less polluted, with carbon-dioxide emissions falling 16.4% in the year the charge was introduced. The number of traffic accidents in which someone was hurt fell to 1,629 in 2005 from 2,296 in 2002, and 24,000 people cycled through the city every day in 2006, up from 16,000 in 2002, according to Transport for London. It is also easier and quicker to catch a taxi or bus, it says.

Judging the 2003 plan a "brilliant success," Mr. Livingstone doubled the tax zone in February to some 15 square miles and included many of London's wealthiest neighborhoods and famous attractions like Kensington Palace, the Victoria & Albert Museum and Harrods department store. He made the charge applicable from 7 a.m. until 6 p.m., instead of 6:30 p.m.

Here's how it works: People can pay the charge at convenience stores, by phone, by sending a text message from their cellphones, or on the Internet. Commuters can pay by the year.

People have until midnight after the day they drive through to pay. Motorcycles, taxis, police cars, ambulances, buses and cars using alternate fuels are exempt. The 330,000 residents who live inside the zone get a 90% discount; they pay about $1.60 a day, since anytime they drive anywhere, they're in the zone.

There are no toll booths or barriers. Instead, the zone is ringed by hundreds of cameras that photograph car-license plates. A computer program reads the shots and checks the license-plate numbers against the list of people who have paid the charge. License plates that show up as unpaid are matched against the government's Motor Vehicle Registry to find the car owner's name and address. People who don't pay are fined about $205, or $102 if they pay within two weeks of getting the fine.

The system, designed to be paperless and environmentally friendly, is expensive. It costs about $184 million a year to run and generates $430 million in revenue, including fines, according to Transport for London.

Some Opposition

When Mr. Livingstone proposed expanding the zone in February, people protested. A government survey found that 72% of residents in the new zone areas opposed the idea. On the first day of the expansion, people protested by driving their cars, slowly, around the border of the zone.

In New York, Mayor Michael Bloomberg based his congestion pricing plan on London's. ENLARGE

The company that administers the congestion charge, Capita Group PLC, discovered a letter bomb in February that injured a mail-room clerk. Police have arrested and charged a 27-year-old in the attack, one of several at traffic enforcement offices at the time, but haven't said what the motive was. He is due to face trial next month.

Acupuncturist Roison Golding opened her new clinic in Wandsworth, five miles outside the city, in May because she thought it would be impossible to convince many clients to drive through the congestion zone. "I knew they wouldn't drive in because they resent it," she says. "It's so much harassment driving a car around London anyway."

One of the few times she'll drive into the city is to pick up her 74-year-old grandmother, who visits from Ireland once a year. Otherwise, Ms. Golding says, "I'm not going to take the risk of going anywhere near the city."

Some shop owners and restaurants say they are worried their business will suffer because fewer people are driving into town. And the London Chamber of Commerce and Industry, a business group, says it has anecdotal evidence that the charge is hurting shops. But a 279-page study of the plan by Transport for London concluded it hadn't damaged business.

People stay away because "it's not just about the money. It's the hassle factor" of having to pay, says Jane Morris, owner of Percy Bass, an interior design shop in Kensington.

So far, she hasn't noticed a drop in customers at her shop, but she says she is worried. She led 150 shopkeepers in two protest marches against the charge.

The zone's expansion placed one of the city's large hospitals, Chelsea & Westminster, 200 yards inside the zone. Suddenly, the hospital's emergency room was busiest just after 6 p.m. -- when the zone stops operating -- instead of at 4 p.m., says Chief Executive Heather Lawrence.

"Maybe [the ER patients] are not as urgent as they thought they were," Ms. Lawrence says.

People who can prove they drove through the zone for a genuine medical emergency can get a refund, but that doesn't include women in labor, a spokeswoman for Transport for London says.

When Hazel Keegan went into labor, she went to the University College Hospital in central London by ambulance. Her husband drove to visit her the next day, but he was so distracted, he forgot the pay the charge.

A few weeks later, the couple was home with their new son Ryan, when a fine arrived in the mail for about $102. "We were furious," Ms. Keegan says. "We just knew it wasn't worth contesting it because they really do not care."

About one million fines were issued last year to people who didn't pay the charge, according to Transport for London. Many foreign embassies don't pay, arguing the charge is a tax and can't be levied on diplomats under international law. The U.S. embassy has racked up more than $3.4 million in fines, prompting Mr. Livingstone to publicly call U.S. Ambassador Robert Tuttle a "little crook."

A spokeswoman for the U.S. embassy, Susan Domowitz, declined to comment but referred to a statement issued by the embassy last year saying British embassies don't pay taxes in the U.S.

Drivers who believe they have been unfairly fined can appeal to the Road User Charging Adjudicator Tribunal, which was set up to handle complaints about fines. It received about 16,000 appeals last year. The tribunal's adjudicators, lawyers who hear traffic cases part time, reject most in writing, the Tribunal says.

But, each year, several thousand people opt to argue their cases before an adjudicator. The tribunal is housed in an old office building near Trafalgar Square. In the morning, people gather in the foyer waiting to be ushered up to the small hearing rooms, which contain little more than a few chairs, a desk and a computer.

A $200 Mistake

One recent morning at the tribunal's offices, Rich Asherman, a 35-year-old policeman, pleaded his case in a 20-minute hearing. Mr. Asherman said he simply forgot to pay. "One hundred pounds [about $204] is completely disproportionate to my mistake," he said. The adjudicator, Timothy Smith, rejected his appeal on the spot and ordered him to pay.

A few days before flying to Sri Lanka for his honeymoon last October, Richard Williams drove through the zone without realizing. He returned home six weeks later to a letter from a collection agency demanding $1,000 for failing to pay the fine.

Soon after, a bailiff from a debt collection agency turned up at his country home and clamped his Mercedes car. He complained to the collection agency, which agreed he could pay about $463 instead. "I certainly keep my eyes open when I drive into London now," Mr. Williams says.

Still, for some people living in the zone, there are benefits. They say streets are quieter, making it easier to find parking spaces. In Kensington and Chelsea, parking-meter payments are down 13% since the neighborhoods were included in the zone earlier this year because people leave their cars outside the zone, according to a spokesman for the local council.

When June Adams returned from an art exhibition at London's Royal Academy few weeks ago, she found a space in front of her North Kensington home on what had previously been a crowded street. Ms. Adams, 72, is waiting for second hip-replacement surgery and walks with a cane, so liked being so close to the house.

"It's also a lot more pleasant to walk the dog," says her husband, Eddie, 70.

"I think London's traffic was appalling and it needed sorting out," says Nick Jones, who owns the Soho House clubs in London and New York. The congestion charge "has helped to do that."

Mr. Jones says the tax hasn't affected his businesses, which include a restaurant, cinema and night club in Notting Hill, part of area included in the zone this year.

But expanding the zone this year has had one counterintuitive effect: the number of vehicles in the original area rose 4% from last year, to 328,000. That's because the 230,000 residents who live in the newly included area are now free to drive downtown without paying any more than it costs to travel their own streets.

Like John Daly, a fund manager who lives in an apartment near Hyde Park. Mr. Daly says his wife now regularly drives to his Mayfair office to pick him up Friday afternoons. He used to catch the train home.

Write to Aaron O. Patrick at

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