I drive around London at weekends occasionally – I have a car but do not bother to use it to get work (I can reach my office in Westminster on foot, thanks to living nearby Pimlico). But when I do get behind the wheel, the congestion is terrible, not just at the usual peak times. Getting out of London often takes longer than on the open road. For example, whenever I go to visit my parents in Suffolk, at least half of the journey time is taken up by driving from Pimlico through the eastern reaches of London before actually hitting Essex on the A12. Pretty much the same dire situation applies if you head north, south or west.
Has the congestion charge, introduced by London Mayor Ken Livingstone, made much difference? I doubt it; it always looked like a revenue-raiser to me, whatever the spin. While in theory I have no ideological problems with the charge – if the roads are genuinely privately owned, that is – in the current context the charge seems like a bit of a con to me. Or at least it is unless we can get rid of the curse of the Bus Lane. But then the charge does not apply at weekends, so my view might be affected if I had to drive during weekdays. On those rare times when I have done so, I thought the traffic was pretty heavy.
This guy agrees with me. But what to do about it? Well, cutting down the number of buses – heavily subsidised – might be a start since they hog up so much space; some road widening might be workable in places but given London’s densely-packed streets and historic buildings, maybe not easily doable.
Maybe I should face the facts: if I want to drive without raised blood pressure, live in Nevada.
The basic problem is that London has no arterial roads. Without fixing that fundamental problem, nothing else is going to work.
Mostly given up driving in London now. I tend to keep the car parked in non-charging areas outside Central London and commute into more central areas using a folding electric bike. One nice benefit is that you get to REALLY piss off bus and black cab drivers by cutting in on their buslanes. Nowawdays I can do Chelsea to Mayfair in under 15 minutes on bike – and this thing will happily cruise at 15mph without any pedalling required.
Basically, you can have more road, or less traffic. The second of these is almost certainly easier to achieve, although I’m less sure that the C-charge is a good way of doing it. Buses have improved amazingly, but I can’t say if that is really down to the C-charge, or simply because there are far more buses than there were.
Building more road in London is not going to be easy. You can stack roads on top of each other, Tokyo style, or build them underground, or knock things down to make them wider. None of these seem realistic. Underground would be most pleasant, but fantastically expensive.
Getting rid of bus lanes might improve matters, but only if you assume none of the bus passengers end up driving instead. Possibly a safe assumption, although they *would* probably end up using the tube – which is just as overcrowded as the roads.
I’m not sure I see a huge problem. Yes it’s a shame that Napoleon never came and bulldozed wide boulevards through London, so that we could enjoy 4 lanes, 4 cycle lanes and 2 tram lines down all our major streets – but it’s a bit late to start the compulsory purchase orders now.
I like London’s chaotic transport. I especially like the way bicycle rickshaws bring entire lanes of traffic to a crawl, because some enterprising types have discovered how to make a virtue out of slow transportation, much to the fury of other road users.
The problem is ultimately self limiting. And anyway, London is a rotten city to drive in, but it is a very pleasant city to walk in.
As J says, if you want roads you have to go for elevated, lots of demolition, or tunnels. While I actually think elevated looks cool in Shanghai, I don’t think anyone wants it in London. At this point in history demolition is definitely out. Putting the roads in tunnels can be made to work actually. My former home of Sydney, Australia, has actually done rather well at this, and has build quite a number of urban motorways in tunnels, and has done this mostly with private capital under schemes where a private company builds the road and then operates it and collects toll. The costs haven’t been all that exorbitant. (Before somebody mentions it, one of these tunnels did indeed go politically bad a couple of years ago due to the combination of the government signing various dubious secret deals with the developer and the developer making a huge mess of traffic forecasts, but from an engineering perspective it was fine, the shareholders who lost their money invested it voluntarily, and five or six other projects went completely right). In many cities I think “underground” is quite viable.
The trouble with London is all the tunnels that are down there already. Many are rail tunnels, but there are all kinds of other things as well. To build underground roads in London you would have to do very deep, and that would be expensive and impractical.
So that is a long way of saying I agree. New roads are not generally viable in London. The best that can do is improved and upgraded public transport. And the funny thing is that I think things are getting better. We do appear to be getting Crossrail (although not a perfect form of it). We look like we are getting Thameslink
2000Program. We are getting the East London Line extensions. I think rather more is being done than has happened for a while.I saw a program a bit back documenting a wave of urban planning that affected several major cities around the early 1800s. Building the straight boulevards to facilitate troop movements and cannon fire in suppression of riots in Paris, for example. Manhattan was a typical old-school (unplanned, medieval) town when the city fathers imposed a regular grid of wide streets over the entire island, even the unpopulated parts.
I leave it as an exercise for the locals to decide if Londoners were insufficiently unruly or insufficiently autocratic to impose radical changes over 2000 years of chaos.
I also have to admit that the presence of bodies of water or other natural hazards seems to bring almost any planning effort to naught.
After the Great Fire of London, Sir Christopher Wren and various others came up with plans to rebuild London in the Continental style with long, wide boulevards. However, as it tends to do, London just rebuilt itself piecemeal, reconstructing streets that have had the same layout since the Romans ran the place.
As impractical as that is, I rather like the fact that London has continually rebuilt itself on the same pattern for millenia. New constructions on ancient patterns.
Has anybody checked out Drew Carey’s TV program over on congestion at Reason TV
The problem with buses is what to do with the people they carry. When I was back over a week or so ago, they seemed reasonably busy, if not at capacity on all the routes I was looking at. They also seemed to move a lot better than they used, as do black cabs.
I’ve made it a point never to drive in London if I can possibly avoid if because it’s always been a nightmare.
I think Terry Pratchet and Neil Gaiman summed it up in Good Omens; London wasn’t really a city designed for cars… then again, it wasn’t designed for people either.
I quite like it that way. It’s still my favourite city.
I rather appreciate your accursed bus lanes. As I can’t afford to drive a car around London, I find them extremely useful.
Warm in winter, cool in summer (no dying of heat on the Victoria Line), a practically door-to-door service, I commute by bus. From Richmond to Warren Street. Two buses, to be exact. The 33 from the top of the road to Hammersmith and a 10 or a 27 into town. It takes about two hours each way. I read. If I haven’t had enough sleep, I doze. Without bus lanes, particularly the one up Castelnau, this would run into spending more time travelling than at work. A one-week bus pass is 13 quid. Get on the buses, live a little!
someone will have the brilliant idea of putting in lightrail or trollies and taking busses out of service. you’ll move half the people at ten times the cost, block off roads to any traffic rather than getting stuck behind busses or losing just one lane, and the authourities will cry SUCCESS!
here in portland it would be cheaper for the city to hire a luxury town car for anyone travelling from the airport to downtown than continuing to run the light rail line intended for that commute.
forget about the “traffic calming” measures which are putting in huge speed bumps, building huge planters in the middle of 4 way intersections, and closing random roads to thru traffic to get to larger arterials – all intended to make life so miserable for drivers as to force them onto mass transit (to no effect)
Light rail can work. The DLR seems to in East London. I can’t speak for Portland but Seattle is crying out for a lightrail system, at least one that covers Seattle – Bellevue – Overlake Transit Centre – Redmond, with extensions for Kirkland, Kent and Renton.
Of course, the point is to run something like that in addition to the buses and have a sensible, fully integration transportation system that makes it easy to leave the car at home.
I’d quite like an option which doesn’t involve 25 minutes sitting on the 520 Lake Washington bridge everyday trying to feed the traffic onto the 2 lane bridge.
The problem with the congestion charge is the concept itself.
If it works and gets people out of cars and into public transport, then it produces no revenue (which it probably hasn’t yet if setup costs are taken into account) to improve the public transport which would not cope with the extra demand.
So they cannot afford for it to really work.
What it is really is a tax, because I don’t think people will pay £8 willingly just to drive a car. They mostly have to.
Sell off the roads to the highest bidders and see what evolves.
That is the only way to tell what mixture of cars, trams, light rail (whatever) works best.