The London congestion charge is set for a welcome New Year shake-up.
New rules due to come into force on 4th January will finally scrap the westward extension of the c-charge zone, freeing residents, businesses and travellers in Bayswater, Notting Hill, Kensington and Chelsea from the grips of the scheme.
The shrunken zone will stretch only from an Edware Road - Park Lane - Vauxhall Bridge Road boundary in the west to the current eastern boundary.
The change will fufill at last the election promise to scrap the western enlargement of the zone made by London mayor Boris Johnson, which was thought to be a major factor in his success over his repressive, money-grasping predecessor Ken Livingstone. Economic boost
Thousands of people who enter the western zone, or who were forced to travel through it to access work, will save a fortune. This will very likely be spent instead on goods and services that both improve their lives and provide much-needed support for the businesses on which Britain's economic recovery depends.
For example, those who travel into or through the western zone three times a week at £8 a shot will enjoy an incredible saving of £1,248 per year.
Given that surveys estimate 60% of all journeys through the western extension originate outside the zone, that a third of western zone users admits to finding the c-charge hard to afford, and that a majority of local businesses blamed the c-charge for reduced profitability, the move will provide a welcome increase in income for particularly low- and average-waged households for whom public transport cannot meet their needs - as well as for local businesses. Oppressive time limit tackled
A further beneficial development is the launch of a new 'Auto Pay' service, which records each visit into the zone made by cars that are registered for the service and takes a monthly payment.
This helps alleviate the outrageous situation in which, if you forgot to pay on the day of travel or the day after, you were hit with a massive £60 fine.
Quite how Ken Livingstone felt it reasonable or appropriate to put such a short time limit on payment of his 'toll tax' is beyond imagination, but reveals a great deal that's unappealing about that man's mindset.
I wonder how many people have already been grossly ripped off - and how much hard-earned cash has been robbed by officialdom as a result of brief distraction or forgetfulness - due to that particularly oppressive element of the scheme.
There are also changes to the exemption rules to link free access to the zone to a car's emissions rather than its alternative fuel technology. What Car magazine has published a handy list of winners and losers as a result of this change.
Charge to rise
But the news isn't all good.
While many people stand to be released from the impositions and costs of the scheme, those who still need to drive in the original central zone face charges that are being increased from a level that is already beyond reasonable or acceptable.
The daily charge to enter the zone will be hiked by £2, from £8 to £10 if you pay on the day you enter the zone and from £10 to £12 if you pay the day after - although you'll get away with £9 if you're registered for 'Auto Pay'.Reality check
But all this discussion of tweaks to the c-charge overlooks the elephant in the room. It has not cut congestion.
Livingstone's scheme has been failing almost since the start. All at vast expense to the public, £340m of which - up to November 2009 - has been pocketed by the 'public administration' plc Capita for creating and running the system.
As far back as late 2007 and again in April 2008 there were warnings that the scheme was not reducing congestion in the c-charge zone.
Today, even TfL continues to admit that "sadly, congestion has risen back to pre-charging levels".
Though TfL goes on to claim, dubiously, that the situation would be worse without the charge and blames this outcome on "widespread water and gas main replacement works, which have greatly reduced the road capacity" and "Traffic management measures to help pedestrians and other road users".
Problems that clearly remain since April 2008, the second of which has been very much in TfL's gift to resolve.
Isn't it somewhat outrageous to charge people large sums for the benefit of driving in a supposedly reduced congestion area, just to make changes to other aspects of "traffic management" that have made congestion just as bad as it was before any charge was levied at all? How does TfL justify this behaviour and its continued right to charge car users anything at all?
Bus problem
Or perhaps those excuses are not the real problems contributing to the failure of the scheme at all.
The more likely reason, as we've previously blogged, is that Ken Livingstone wasted the c-charge income on a vast increase in bus numbers.
Anyone who has followed a bus through London will know the congestion and tailbacks even one causes while it negotiates London's crowded streets, spewing health-endangering diesel fumes, often with only a handful of people on board.
There are far too many, being subsidised at excessive public cost.
Congrats, but ...
So, Boris - congratulations for scrapping the western zone as you promised. A politician who keeps his promises is certainly not to be sniffed at!
But now its time to face facts. The c-charge isn't cutting congestion. It's just a massive extra tax on Londoners and a gift for paper-shuffling, public-harassing, penalty-charging officialdom.
It's time to rid London of Ken Livingstone's ridiculous and repressive congestion charging scam altogether.
If you're wondering why this blog has been so quiet for the last couple of months, it's down to a sense that 2008 offered a glimmer of hope that car users are turning the corner against overbearing politicians and repressive eco-mentalists.
Wishful thinking? Probably. Maybe the recent drop in fuel prices and the temporary delay of road tax hikes announced back in the Pre-Budget Report has gone to our heads.Our last posting back in October heralded the start of the debate over congestion charging in Manchester. Thankfully the plan was rejected resoundingly by almost 80% of local voters.
This was despite the best efforts of the government and its BBC supporters to bribe locals with the promise of billions of pounds of spending on public transport projects.
These were projects than Mancunians justifiably thought should be provided anyway, paid for out of the considerable taxes they have already handed over to the government - rather than the billions of pounds extra that congestion charging would have cost them.
C-charging under fire
Of all the projects dreamt up by today's politicians - who seem to regard car users as cash machines they can raid repeatedly whenever they've wasted too much money elsewhere - congestion charging took the biggest kicking of 2008.
Some months before Manchester's triumph, the archdeacon of the anti-car lobby, Ken Livingstone, was ousted as mayor of London - having threatened a completely unjustifiable £25 daily charge that would have hit a wide range of normal family car users.
Livingstone spun the plan as designed to target those dastardly 4x4s that the eco-extremists seem to have an irrational obsession about. Irrational, given most 4x4s are no bigger, nor as gas guzzling than many mid-range family cars.
Spun out of office
Trouble was, anyone who could glance at a car magazine knew that targetting just 4x4s by emissions was impossible and that far more people were going to be financially slammed by the massive increase than Ken claimed. So Ken was kicked out.
A lesson there for all politicians about the dangers of over-confidence in the ability to spin a political agenda in the face of blatantly contrary facts.
His successor, Boris Johnson, has already consulted local people and pledged to scrap the westward extended area of the London zone.
Almost 28,000 took part in the consultation, of whom 67% and 86% of businesses supported the removal of the zone - similar numbers to those opposing its introduction in the first place, but whom Livingstone simply ignored.
The zone will be shrunk to its original central area by 2010, but given current economic circumstances local businesses and people are pushing for the toll to be lifted sooner.
Anyone listening?
While locally-based congestion charging faced an overwhelming public battering in 2008 - in addition to the 1.8 million people who signed a Downing Street petition in 2007 - road pricing has not yet been driven off the government's agenda.
What is it going to take for these people to get the message?This year the Department for Transport will press ahead with trials for a pay-as-you-drive scheme that could see car users paying £1.30 a mile at the busiest times. The basis of the idea is to ration road space rather than provide the necessary capacity or a viable alternative - an approach which, if applied to hospitals or schools, would cause uproar.
In addition to the democratic insult of ignoring repeatedly expressed public opposition to the idea, according to the Daily Express trails have already cost £10 million and the bill is only going upwards.
Rationing roads
The government line is that the trials are designed to "inform the work of those local authorities who are considering taking forward local congestion charging".
But what council would still seriously consider such a scheme after the fate that befell policy-makers last year in London and Manchester?
Naive defenders of pay-as-you-drive - such as some long established organisations purporting to represent the interests of motorists - seem to have the idea that if such a scheme replaces road tax, or if fuel tax is reduced, then drivers could benefit.
Leaving aside, as those organisations sadly do, the privacy implications of individual movement-tracking, does anyone seriously imagine that the government would implement a system costing billions of pounds if it wasn't going to rake in more money from us in the long term than whatever taxes it replaces?
Further moves towards road pricing look set to remain the biggest policy threat to the finances of car users into 2009. But, of course, authorities both national and local are already planning many other petty annoyances to hinder and frustrate the vast majority of car users for whom there is no viable alternative to life on the road.
More about those in another post.
Diesel pollution 'clogs arteries'
Diesel fumes appear to combine with artery-clogging fats to raise the risk of heart disease, research published in the online journal Genome Biology suggests. UCLA scientists found the two act in concert to switch on genes that cause potentially dangerous inflammation of the blood vessels. The results suggest that government incentives - such as cheaper road tax - to encourage people to buy diesel cars in order to reduce carbon emissions is likely to be having a directly adverse effect on human health.Yet it's far from proven that reducing human carbon emissions will have any effect whatsoever on the planet's climate.
Lead researcher Dr André Nel, an expert in nanomedicine, said the impact of diesel particles and cholesterol fats combined was much greater than the impact of each in isolation.
He said: "Their combination creates a dangerous synergy that wreaks cardiovascular havoc far beyond what's caused by the diesel or cholesterol alone."
Both are sources of molecules called free radicals which cause cell and tissue damage, and can trigger the inflammation that leads to artery disease.
The researchers combined the pollutants and fats and cultured them with cells taken from the inner lining of human blood vessels.
A few hours later, they extracted DNA from the cells for genetic analysis. They showed that the genes that promote cellular inflammation had been activated.
Then they exposed mice with high cholesterol to the diesel particles, and saw that some of the same genes were activated in the animals' tissue.
Dr Nel said: "Exactly how air pollutants cause cardiovascular injury is poorly understood.
"But we do know that these particles are coated with chemicals that damage tissue and cause inflammation of the nose and lungs.
"Vascular inflammation in turn leads to cholesterol deposits and clogged arteries, which can give rise to blood clots that trigger heart attack or stroke."
If the government turns out to be wrong about the cause of climate change, and global warming is not related to man-made carbon emissions, then they will have to take responsibility for pursuing policies likely to have caused thousands of people major health problems.
This study certainly destroys any claim by London mayor Ken Livingstone - in seeking to reduce the number of petrol cars on the road through congestion charging, yet needlessly packing the roads with diesel buses - to be motivated by a desire to improve air quality or human health.
The London congestion charge is set for a welcome New Year shake-up.
