> most of the revenue disappears in administration costs.
I saw a nice chart that showed that after 5 years and including startup costs, the London scheme has netted ~10M GBP on a little over 1B GBP of revenue. Oh, and an important measure of success -- average 'excess delay' -- is exactly where it was when they started. So: a big transfer of wealth, sure; not so much on the helping fix the congestion problem or the raising money for the transit problem.
One really interesting effect has been a nice roller coaster:
- Lots of license plates were stolen to avoid the charge (the AAA suggested in 2006 that 1/250 of the cars in the zone are using a stolen plate); someone else gets the bill and has to spend time proving they weren't where the camera says they were (factoid: in 2005, 65,000 tickets were given; about 2000 were ultimately collected)
- Enforcement changed, spy-vs-spy-style, and compliance has gone up
- Expected revenue dropped because, shockingly, fewer people get fined now
Oops, there goes your rosy revenue model projections; time to raise the fee!
And on,
/jordan