Britain battles clogged streets

It has been called the most radical highway experiment since the introduction of traffic lights.

Monday, as London launched an effort to unclog its streets, motorists began paying for the privilege of driving in an eight-square-mile area downtown. With the £5 ($8) a day charge per car, the city hopes to both cut traffic and raise the equivalent of $190 million annually to shore up the city's public transport system.

Major cities around the globe, such as New York and Paris, are watching to see if the world's largest congestion-charging scheme will work.

Though critics have predicted bumper-to-bumper bedlam, there were few signs of gridlock Monday - perhaps because the launch was timed to coincide with the start of a school-holiday week. The only disturbance for many motorists streaming north into the city came from small pockets of protesters huddled in the morning twilight.

"It's a total outrage," says Lawrence Frewin, a real estate agent who relies on his car to do his job. "There are thousands of small businesses that this is seriously going to affect, and they've made no effort whatsoever to find out what the impact is going to be," he says as he flaps leaflets at passing drivers, some of whom honk their approval. "You take a £1,000 pounds [$1,600] off the bottom line a year and what's the point in working?"

Britain is Europe's most congested country; London, Britain's most choked up city. On a bad day, it can take more than an hour to drive from the congestion zone's southern border at Vauxhall Bridge to fashionable Islington on the northern perimeter three miles away.

London Mayor Ken Livingstone - a non-driver who professes to hate cars - hopes that the weekday toll will reduce traffic by at least 15 percent. If successful, he plans to widen the zone by a mile or more eastward and westward.

The chief problem is that the alternatives to cars are dismal. Those who try to skirt the congestion-charge zone will find already clogged perimeter arteries even tighter. And public transport - in decline for decades here - is expected to be swamped with an additional 20,000 commuters a day as motorists leave the roads.

The congestion charge is expected to shunt thousands more passengers on to the unloved, underfunded Tube (subway), which is already struggling to deal with its 3.25 million daily users. Transport officials say the additional volume will only amount to one extra passenger per subway car. But the timing couldn't be worse: One of the main lines is shut until the end of March after an accident in January that injured 32 people.

"It's a disadvantage that the Tube is not in better nick [condition] than it is," says Prof. Stephen Glaister of Imperial College London, who was involved in drafting the original congestion-charge proposals. "It's not going to help the Tube, which is already overcrowded," he says, but adds that, "that in itself is not going to be fatal."

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