London Congestion Charge (US Embassy)

[Sundae]

Has there been anything in the media in the US about the Embassy in London refusing to pay the £8 per day congestion charge?

I can only have 1 window open at a time on this pc (logged on in the library) so I can't provide you with all the facts here & now, but for a brief overview:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/4352520.stm

I wondered if anyone had any opinions on it? Of course the British press/ television is mainly based in London and therefore the journalists (using public transport or paying the charge themselves) will have an obvious bias. I share it being an ex-Londoner myself, and I admit mine is probably knee-jerk "follow my rules when you're on my manor"......

So does anyone think this is a defensible position?

[barefoot serpent]

No taxation without representation! When are you Royalists gonna get it?

[wolf]

Originally Posted by Sundae Girl

So does anyone think this is a defensible position?

You guys charge people to watch television. We think that's silly too.

[Undertoad]

It was covered on Fark. Seems the relevant details are that embassy folks are not required to pay tax and that foreign embassies are coming to the conclusion that this is a tax even though mayor says it's a charge.

This is the part of the Times story that I thought was most important, emphasis mine:

Meanwhile, figures published by the Government’s Small Business Service reveal the decline in small businesses in the congestion zone last year. For the first time in ten years, the number of businesses that de-registered for VAT (closed or went bankrupt) exceeded new business start-ups in the City, in Westminster, Holborn and St Pancras, leaving London languishing at the bottom of the national league table.

Those businesses in areas that surround the charging zone showed net gains, but overall, London has plunged into the red. Peter Hulme Cross, business spokesman for the One London group at the London Assembly, challenged the mayor on the damage to small businesses in the zone and called for concessions, including suspension of the charge outside morning and evening rush-hour periods.

"This disturbing evidence of business closures from the Government’s own figures is clear," he said. "Street parties and other gimmicks are not enough to rescue these businesses. Practical measures are needed urgently. The mayor is ignoring these figures for political convenience and Central London businesses are going to the wall at record levels."

Mr Livingstone denied that the charge was a significant factor in driving business out of Central London.

Is London going to remain a great city of the world? Not if it charges people to be there.

[Elspode]

So diplomats are expected to pay $14 per trip to the Embassy/Office if it is located in central London, or ride the bus/take a cab, where there is no security, no bombproofing/armor, and a scheduled, predictable route?

That doesn't sound very safe. I'd say the hell with it, too. It is a tax, pure and simple. It is a fee collected by a government for the purposes of funding government programs or regulating public behavior. How the hell can it be called anything *but* a tax?

[xoxoxoBruce]

I'd love to hear the NYC Mayor's take on this, considering the problems they have with diplomatic tagged cars around the UN and various embassies.

[jaguar]

What a bloody joke, it's not a tax any more than a toll road is. you pay for what you use. As for business, living here, trust me, any claims of the city being quiet and everyone going backrupt because of this is utter crap. It has however made traffic move a little again and is widely viewed here as a major success. You have to understand that you're mad to drive into london anyway, everyone, from execs to bus uses the PT because its the only way to get anywhere in a reasonable time short of a chopper thus the idea that there are less people is frankly, laughable. Furthermore, recently they closed Oxford St to traffic for a day, a friend of mine is a manager at the massive TopShop at Oxford Circus - they recorded a 40% increase in business.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

The Libertarians among us note that when excessive costs, like a "congestion charge" are imposed upon doing business, or upon employment, business and employment both decline and fall.

Britain needs more libertarianism or Britain will become as Spain, and mid-20th-century Spain at that.

[jaguar]

Take a town planning course, halfwit. Maybe traffic isn't an issue in buttfuck, nowhere USA but this is a very old city with a limited road space network with a massive, massive traffic problem, the economic cost of it is huge. The city centre simply didn't move, real, complete gridlock every day. Thanks to the congestion charge, it works again. To illustrate my point I'll give you a couple of quotes from the bastion of liberal wolly-headed thinking, the Economist which hailed the scheme as a success:

Bigger and dearer
Jul 7th 2005

"TWO and a half years since its launch, Londoners like their city's crude road-pricing scheme. It has cut city-centre traffic by 15% and congestion by 30%."

Ken Livingstone's gamble
Feb 13th 2003

"a 1999 study by the Texas Transportation Institute estimated that the annual cost of congestion in 68 urban areas, in wasted fuel and increased operating costs was $72 billion."

"A recent visit [to singapore] suggests the system is working well. Even some of the city's obstreperous taxi drivers accept that it has reduced congestion."

Ken's coup

Mar 20th 2003
From The Economist print edition
London's congestion charge is working better than even its advocates expected

IT HAS been a bad month for those who predicted that London's congestion charge would bring the city to a chaotic halt. Since the £5-a-day ($8) charge for driving in central London between 7am and 6.30pm was introduced on February 17th, average speeds in the area have more than doubled. For Ken Livingstone, London's mayor, who introduced the charge, this is not all good news: it has been so successful in turning away traffic that it is raising less money than expected.

According to Derek Turner, boss of the capital's street management department, traffic has been reduced by 20% and delays cut by nearly 30%. Speeds in the charged zone have increased from 9.5mph to 20mph. Delays to buses caused by congestion are down by half. As a result, bus passenger numbers are up by 14%.

The number-plate-recognition technology is working well. Just under 100,000 motorists a day are paying the charge, more and more of them on their mobile phones, by text message.

Those living on the zone's borders feared that traffic would be diverted on to their streets. Mysteriously, although there is 10% more traffic on the peripheral roads, journey times along them have not increased. Cynics reckon that traffic lights were fiddled to increase journey times in the run-up to the charge's introduction, and that they have since been readjusted to make traffic flow more easily.

It is not yet clear whether the decrease in traffic has hit retailers. For the moment, they are more worried about the closure of the Central Line on London's Underground. Half of the shoppers surveyed in an ICM poll carried out for Retail News said it would deter them from driving into the zone. Even so, 55% are in favour of it. London First, a business organisation, says that three-quarters of the companies it surveyed in London believed that the charge was working well. Just under a third said the impact on their business had been helpful, 65% said it had been neutral and only 5% said it had been negative.

According to a MORI poll, 50% of Londoners are in favour of the congestion charge compared with 36% against. Mr Livingstone's personal poll ratings are now higher than they were when he was elected three years ago. His aides joke that he has peaked too soon.

So far, the only downside for Mr Livingstone is that revenues, at £9.5m for the first four weeks, are somewhat lower than expected. As a result, net revenues may be under £100m a year though fines may boost the total. The numbers of drivers who do not pay the charge is now down to about 4,000 a day. If they fail to pay their £80 fine, at least they'll be able to get to court on time.

[Elspode]

No one said it didn't work.

If we start having to pay to breathe the air, does the air become a service? Here in Missouri, USA, that backward place, we pay an energy surcharge based on our electrical and gas usage. It is used to fund pollution reduction. I guess this, using the same reasoning as the London situation, would be an "air service fee", and not a tax?

[barefoot serpent]

If you want to call it a toll -- put up toll gates like the ones we have here in Bumfuck, Kansas -- even with RF meters so you can just roll thru.

[jaguar]

when you start running out of air, a system of effective rationing might start seeming like a good idea, until that point it sure does sound silly doesn't it. Of course you have to breathe air, noone is making you drive though the centre of london. Every day everyone that travels though the centre of london, from diplomats to street cleaners can make a decision, do I take a car or do I take PT/walk/chopper/bike/moterbike, if you choose to take a car, you pay the congestion charge. and elspode - urbane gurilla is trying to claim that it doesn't work.

[Elspode]

I didn't get that he said sit didn't work. I got more like a "more government regulation is screwing up the world" sort of vibe.

I think the core of this issue is that semantics won't make me think of it as anything other than a tax, and semantics won't make you think of it as anything other than a service fee.

Meantime, someoneone is going to have to figure out what to call it so that the diplomatic corps, who aren't going to be riding buses or subways anytime soon, will pay it.

[jaguar]

My point was it's a net economic benefit, his implication is that it's a net loss.
There were a couple of scholars of the vienna treaty that governs this stuff on the radio, they thought it should be paid.

[Happy Monkey]

Originally Posted by barefoot serpent

If you want to call it a toll -- put up toll gates like the ones we have here in Bumfuck, Kansas -- even with RF meters so you can just roll thru.

Um, essentially, they did. Except in a way that doesn't even slow traffic down. Which was the point.