A spring post about London roads, after a dreary winter

I wrote this sometime in March 2003, after a last three months of grim work at CARE, and looking for a new job.

If an alien were to land in London and wander around, he(it?) would think that most Londoners were men in florescent green vests, who dug up the roads for a living.

Apparently the number of road work sites has skyrocketed in the past few years, since the city loosened the rules for getting a permit to dig holes; consequently, the water, hydro, phone and roads people no longer coordinate with each other, but simply start digging when it suits their own schedule. One stretch of Holborn High Street (centre of the City) has had more roadworks projects than days in the year.

You can imagine the effect on the drivers, on roads that are already narrow by North American standards, that often twist and turn unexpectedly, hallmarks of an old city that grew largely without planning for centuries - with a brief interlude while Christopher Wren redesigned the skyline with his churches.

This week my flatmates and I were beneficiaries of Transport for London's new 'reduced congestion' roadwork policies; breaking up and repaving our street (officially labelled the A3) during the light traffic hours.

For us, this meant works from 9pm til 3am, complete with jackhammers and the heavy equipment armed with backup beepers. Sometimes I heard three vehicles beeping at once; as I lay in bed I imagined they were backing up in circles, competing with each other.

My flatmate Sam is a light sleeper, and her bedroom faces the street like mine. She got up the next morning with puffy red eyes and a foul temper, and proceeded to take a strip off any official related to roadworks she could find. We'd received no notice of this work, she pointed out, and the foreman of the works she'd spoken to had proved rude and uncooperative. Remarkably, that evening four copies of the official notice of works were stuffed through our mailbox, plus one addressed to her personally.

I also called Transport for London's Customer Services, and the woman on the other end warily confirmed that yes, they'd received other complaints about the work. Apparently the work can continue til 5am(!), but the 'noisy' work is supposed to end at midnight. Hah.

All Sam and I could extract were grudging apologies for the noise, couched in the sort of bureaucratic jargon that British civil servants hide behind when they're challenged. One of them explained to Sam that this road surface would last ten years; she replied she didn't have a car.

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On the other hand, I am a complete believer in the London congestion charge, also introduced by Transport for London.

London has its first working mayor. This post is not to be confused with his Worship the Lord Mayor - that's a ceremonial position, reserved for snipping ribbons and sweating in traditional robes.

Thatcher abolished the last municipal government, the Greater London Council, in 1986 (presumeably too much government was bad) and turned their Thameside building into an aquarium. With shoestring budgets and no central coordination, the central boroughs of London began to rot, as they bear more use by tourists and all London residents, but had no extra funding for services. The garbage and graffiti in the streets, and the barbed wire and spiked fences and cameras round houses and businesses are testimony to a city that gave up on itself, and every man was for himself. Even the 'far end' of Buckingham Palace's gardens have a ten-foot brick wall, topped with rolling spikes, and angled barbed wire. Yeesh.

When the boroughs of London reinstituted a joint administration of Greater London Authority in 2000, Londoners elected their first mayor. Ken Livingstone was the last leader of the former council, and is a traditional Labour politician (vsBlair's  New Labour in Parliament), though he was elected as an Independent.

http://www.london.gov.uk/gla/index.jsp

Everyone agrees that London traffic is a zoo; apparently the average speed is 10mph, same as it was 100 years ago in horse-drawn days. So 'Red Ken' took a deep breath, donned his asbestos undies and last month introduced a new fee for driving in the centre of the city.

The charge is £5 per day per car. The zone is clearly marked and widely published - I live just outside the charging zone. Cars are recorded by traffic cameras and billed automatically. Drivers can pay by mail, phone, fax, e-mail, or mobile text message (but, says Transport for London, never text while driving). Registered residents pay just 10% (50p a day), working vehicles also get a discount, bikes, scooters and motorcycles are exempt.

To discourage laggards, the fine for not paying  by midnight on the day you drive is £80 per day (halved to £40 if you shell out within 14 days). TV ads now run around 10pm reminding drivers of the fine.

The protest against the charge came largely from...the London newspapers, who revel in disaster (it sells papers) and predicted chaos. But most regular Londoners seemed in favour, since few other incentives have reduced traffic and everyone hates sitting in gridlock.

In fact, everyone expected chaos, including the Mayor. There would be mass nonpaying protests, cameras would fail, drivers would slip through, the Tube would collapse under new riders, the four horsemen of the Apocalypse were getting reshoed in preparation.

But guess what? The charge works. Traffic has lightened around my house, buses can run more freely, and as I ride the top of the doubledeckers I see mostly taxis, delivery vehicles, emergency vehicles and the danged roadworks. Check out the progress reports on the TfL website:

http://www.tfl.gov.uk/tfl/

Some small businesses have switched to trikes or scooters for deliveries, since they're exempt; pizzas and Indian takeaway is already all delivered by scooter or motorcycle (almost all with Learner licenses, it seems).

There have been hiccups; vehicles in wildest Scotland were fined, a historic vehicle in a museum (not seen the road in 50 years) got a bill (some London wiseass fudging his plate numbers). The website couldn't manage the load of last-minute registrants, and didn't work well - well, whose fault is that?  People were annoyed that they'd paid by text or phone and didn't think to ask for a receipt to be mailed. But honestly, any new system has bumps while getting started, and all of them could be remedied.

Most satisfying as an observer and non-driver was the thundering silence from the papers that were most critical, as they scrambled to find any negative story after the first week. Lucky for them there's a war on, or readers might notice.