Valuing the commons: Congestion pricing's hidden payoff Posted by Charles Komanoff at 8:09 PM on 15 Jul 2007
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<http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/7/14/2057/10377>
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New York's still in the push and pull debating stage of things. Meanwhile, London has deployed a fully working system.
For now, I'll leave the passionate pro and con arguments to others because, as usual, I'm more intrigued by the technical specifications.
Here's a description...
from the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy-
<http://www.itdp.org/PR/NY_congestion.html>
The most extensive congestion pricing plan, in London, was pushed by an activist (and populist) mayor, Ken Livingstone, and overseen by a transport commissioner, Robert R. Kiley, who happens to be a former president of the Partnership for New York City and a former chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Mr. Kiley has urged other cities to consider the London model.
Under the plan, drivers are charged a daylong flat fee of £8 ($14) to enter the so-called congestion zone, an eight-square-mile area around London's financial district.
Officials ruled out using "smart cards," similar to the E-ZPass toll-payment devices used on many bridges and tunnels on the East Coast, as cumbersome. Instead, 700 video cameras capture multiple images of license plates of cars that drive through the zone between 7 a.m. and 6:30 p.m., except on weekends and holidays. Computers process the images, matching the license plates photographed against a database of drivers who have paid their congestion fees.
Drivers pay in advance, online, over the telephone or at machines at stores across London. Failure to pay by 10 p.m. on the day of the trip results in higher fees or fines up to £150 ($261). Disabled drivers and residents of the congestion zone are exempt, as are cars that have 9 or more seats or run on electricity or natural gas.
And from Wikipedia -
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_congestion_charge>
The scheme makes use of CCTV cameras which record vehicles entering and exiting the zone. They can record number plates with a 90% accuracy rate through Automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) technology. There are also a number of mobile camera units which may be deployed anywhere in the zone. The majority of vehicles within the zone are captured on camera. The cameras take two still pictures in colour and black and white and use infra red technology to identify the number plates on cars. These identified numbers are checked against the list of payees overnight by computer. In those cases when a number plate has not been recognised then they are checked by humans. Those that have paid but have not been seen in the central zone are not refunded, and those that have not paid and are seen are fined. The registered owner of such a vehicle is looked up in a database provided by the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA), based in Swansea. The cameras can be fooled by tail gating or switching lanes at the correct time.
TfL [Transport for London: gov group which manages most of the transport system of London] ran a six month trial of Tag and Beacon from February 2006 to replace the camera based system. This uses an electronic card affixed to the windscreen of a vehicle and can be used to produce "smart tolls" where charges can be varied dependent on time and direction of travel. This system automatically deducts the charge so that the 50,000 drivers a year who forget to pay the fine would not be penalised. TfL have suggested that this scheme could be introduced from 2009.
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More on the Tag and Beacon option -
from the Guardian -
<http://technology.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,,1501796,00.html>
Users install an on-board unit (OBU), the size of a standard vehicle audio system, which tracks the lorry through GPS and reports its travels using a mobile telephone network. However, Toll Collect, the private-sector operator, has found that GPS is not accurate enough to say on which road a vehicle is where two roads run side by side.
Toll Collect's OBUs cope with this inaccuracy through an internal electronic map, with each tolled route represented by a corridor dozens of yards wider than the road itself. With roads that are side by side, the OBU uses its record of the route taken so far to judge which is being used. Elevated roads present special problems, as GPS is not good at heights. "We have a lot of them in Berlin, as in London," says a spokesperson. For these, Toll Collect has installed roadside radio beacons.
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And of course, there are hacks and countermeasures...
License theft and false licenses:
<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/02/26/lowtech_solution_beats_londons_hitech/>
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4340720.stm>
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I doubt New York - if it really gets around to enacting a congestion plan - will deploy a London style, computer aided CCTV license recognition system.
I imagine critics will dismiss that as being too complex and expensive for the NYC environment. Also, the IT platform for the American system would probably be over-designed and yet, paradoxically, hobbled by bloatware. No doubt law enforcement would demand needless 'anti terror' enhancements such as lengthy data retention policies which privacy advocates would almost surely resist for obvious reasons.
An expansion of the E-ZPass system - perhaps re-engineered to behave somewhat like a Euro tag and beacon network - is a more likely solution (though far from problem free).
.d.