Date published: 2007/08/21
The Cambridge Evening News says:
Cambridge's proposed road toll scheme has been accused of being badly thought out compared with the system planned for Manchester.
Like Cambridgeshire County Council, Manchester City Council is aiming to bar vehicles from its city centre during certain hours each day.
But the planned charge is lower than the fee of up to £5 proposed for Cambridge - and people driving within the congestion zone will not have to pay, says Coun Stuart Newbold, environment spokesman for the Labour group on Cambridge City Council.
Coun Newbold told the News: "Manchester's proposals involve a charge of between £1 and £2 for vehicles that enter the zone from 7am to 9.30am, and a charge of between £1 and £2 for vehicles that leave the zone between 4pm and 6.30pm.
"Huge transport improvements, about £3 billion of spending, are envisaged prior to a 2012 start date.
"Unlike Cambridgeshire, there is no charge for driving against congestion flow, and no charge for driving within the zone. Drivers incur a charge if they are travelling in the direction of congestion during the time that congestion is at its peak.
"And before implementation, Manchester is seeking more time to get the transport infrastructure completed."
Coun Newbold said he feared the county council was pursuing "objectives other than addressing congestion".
"Perhaps the promised consultation will provide the answer," he said. "I'm no fan of the status quo. I do not own a car and I like to think I'm environmentally responsible.
Unlike here, the Manchester scheme looks like a well thought through plan aimed purely at tackling congestion."
Unfortunately for Newbold, Cambridge is not Manchester. Manchester has certainly come up with the best (so-called) congestion charging scheme so far, certainly much better than what is in London. (But none of the schemes proposed so far involve congestion charges. A congestion charge should by definition be proportional to the congestion caused. These schemes just have access charges. Once you pay the tax you can cause as much or as little congestion as you want. And buses, a large source of congestion, pay no tax at all.)
Manchester is a big city and can propose a rational scheme because it has some economy of scale. Cambridge is a small city so has no economy of scale, so any scheme is bound to be dubious from the start. There is little point looking at what Manchester has proposed because it will not work in Cambridge.
Or course there is plenty wrong with what Cambridgeshire County Council is proposing. The fact that they can make these proposals without having a business plan (or at least one they are willing to place into the public domain), shows how amateurish they are. And the county has purposefully made the congestion worse with road closures, and wacky bus and cycle lanes, and the insistance that all retail needs to be in a few spots. The main reason that the county council seems to have come up with their crackpot scheme now is in order to (allegedly) get £500 million of central government money for so-called public transport. This is a very poor reason to introduce a "congestion" charge.
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