It is all very well and good little public schoolboys such as Steven Norris saying and I quote “charging is not the way.” What I’d like to say to him is, “Steven your government has had 38 years to come up with a creditable alternative so where the hell is it? Either put up or shut up.
When will you, accept that something drastic has to be done? We can’t continue throwing millions of pounds of tax payers money on this issue and expect it to resolve its self if that was the case transport in London would be one of the best if not the best in the world. What we need to do is follow the example of other cities worldwide; cities such as Philadelphia, Madrid and Tokyo who all use congestion charging and similar schemes to try and decrease the number o vehicles on their roads and in each one of these cities once the charging scheme was adopted traffic jams and such like were reduced by on average 78%.
You may say none of these cities have any resemblance to London but you would be mistaken; each one of the named cities started out with similar problems as we are experiencing now and all of them got much worse before they got any better. It would be madness to ignore the mistakes of others when we can learn from them.
The scheme itself has many benefits along with few drawbacks to road users, residents, businesses motorists and the environment. All of these will be affected and care and consideration has been taken when considering the significance of the charge on the various groups. The largest and foremost benefit of the scheme would be the reduced amounts of congestion in the key zone, Central London. Even though there are many motorists who consider their trips through central London vital, there will be a number of motorists who will avoid the zone during the charging hours, because they do not need to make that trip. The estimated level of reduction in vehicles passing inside the zone would be 10-15%, with a 30% reduction in the in the levels of congestion surely things can only get better form here onwards think how much traffic could potentially be cut if the zones were extended.
Congestion charging thus far has been on the whole a positive an effective weapon in reducing traffic in and around London since it was introduced on February 17th contrary what certain tabloids would have you believe it has reduced a massive 34% of traffic on London roads in its first day in comparison with the pervious year. However, there’s still along way to go; now I have the financial means to improve transport in London, which I didn’t have before I hope to increase the number of busses and trains and trams in operation hence less cars on the road.
