London's new congestion charges started on Monday. David Aaronovitch reports on an amazing day in the city.
I went confidently in search of The Great Chaos of London. Hadn't everyone, from the mayor to his newspaper critics, agreed that it would be hell out there on Day One? Gridlock and overcrowding would ripple out from the inner circle of C-marked entry points, filling tube trains, buses and feeder roads with disgruntled passengers and displaced ratrunners. White vans would reverse away from spy cameras, killing cyclists. And I would pick my way through the debris interviewing angry drivers and getting great quotes for this article.
So I started on the Northern line of the London Underground, heading south, at just past six in the morning. Oddly, there was only one man in my carriage by Camden Town. Two more got on at King's Cross. By the time we arrived at Old Street on the edge of the City, there were five occupied seats.
Under the Saddamite architecture of the Old Street roundabout, where four great roads come together, the Kham newsagents was opening up. The door was marked with a great C. Yes, said the woman unpacking the day's newspapers - last Friday they had sold two congestion permits. Or was it three?
Up above there should have been a tailback of traffic waiting to charge through the charge points before the charge could be charged. But there wasn't. Buses sailed past, half full. Nothing was blocked, nothing was slow.
On a small island, alongside which lorries, vans and cars drove at speeds often requiring third gear, a small group of placard-wielders had gathered. They were Conservatives. You could tell because (a) there weren't many of them, (b) they were elderly, and (c) they were having difficulty getting enthusiastic.
Their leader on the Greater London authority, an economic migrant from the north called Eric Ollorenshaw, told me how the congestion charge was dividing local communities. "There's a woman here," he said, "a local resident, who can't get her car out of the garage!" Actually the middle-aged woman to whom I spoke could get her Triumph Spitfire out of her garage, but she couldn't drive to her specialised Triumph garage without paying a fiver.
And she needed her car to get to work. Where was that, I asked, "Near Old Street". And where did she live? She gave me an address which I knew to be close both to Angel and Highbury tube stations - the former is one stop from Old Street.
So why didn't she go by train? It took 10 minutes to walk to the station and you could wait for another 25 minutes, and then she often had to take her kids to school. Why didn't she go by bus or tube? Too far. Heavy school books. Trombones.
Later I looked up the school website, which said: "The school is extremely well served by a variety of stations and bus routes." Including the number 4 bus which runs almost from Lady Triumph's door to the school gates.
"You stupid lot! Wake up!" said a middle-aged woman walking past. A cyclist stopped for a moment to argue. They were balanced by the occasional toot from Parcel Force vans and scaffolding lorries, who'll toot at anything, being toot-tarts.
As I turned to leave, a woman from Willesden predicted that central London would "become a no-go area, full of graffiti and foreigners". She was thinking of moving to France.
By now, a new set of placard people had turned up. Real capitalists, they were promoting a dual-fuel green car, which is exempt from the congestion charge and which I shall call (since I have no wish to add to their publicity) the Tonkatsu Priapus.
I got in my car and drove the entire perimeter of the zone. The trip, in the middle of rush-hour London (plus digressions), took 55 minutes, a feat which knocks that of Phileas Fogg into a cocked hat. But it was weirdly easy.
Park Lane was empty. So was the Marylebone Road. So was London Bridge. Everywhere we saw three things: small groups of Tories; larger groups of Tonkatsu sellers; larger still groups of news photographers and camera operators standing uselessly by the side of grid-unlocked roads. At Marble Arch someone was even filming Angela Rippon on a horse.
In speeding buses disconcerted commuters looked at their watches and realised that they'd be arriving 20 minutes early for work, which was going to be hard to explain to the boss.
I took a bus and the tube home, a journey which, in spite of a bomb scare at Euston, lasted no time at all. And I tried to work out what was going on. It was the half-term holiday, but the reduction was beyond anything that could be explained by a lack of school traffic.
There were two possible explanations: one was that the hype about chaos had frightened everyone off. And Mayor Ken Livingstone, far from having played the possibility down, had encouraged it. There's a man who understands the judo principle of using your opponent's weight against him. The other was that the congestion charge actually works.
On the seat next to me there was a discarded copy of the freesheet, Metro. Printed before the morning's traffic got under way it was headlined: "Gridlock fears as road toll kicks in". The report began, "Drivers were today battling through the first morning of congestion charging". Aha! Ha ha ha! Clever old Ken!
- The Guardian