The Day the Traffic Disappeared (NYT login: FRITOPIE; password: FRITOPIE)
London has come up with a novel way to deal with traffic congestion. If you've ever been to London, you'll know what I'm talking about. When your city has been given over to the tyranny of the automobile, perhaps the only way to reverse the trend is to take what some might interpret as desperate measures.
On an unusually bright morning earlier this year, that mayor, Ken Livingstone, strides into the room before a bank of cameras, and with an unusually pleased look on his dour face, announces a coup, one that has eluded dozens of large cities like New York, Los Angeles and Paris. He has not conquered crime or poverty, but he may very well have hobbled an urban enemy seemingly just as invincible: the car. Livingstone has just begun the world's most radical experiment in reclaiming the city from the tyranny of the automobile, a power struggle that cities have been losing in humiliating fashion for more than half a century. Since well before his election, he has been warning Londoners that far too many of them (about 250,000 a day) are trying to drive into far too small a place -- central London -- polluting the air, choking commerce, slowly strangling their own livelihood. To stop them, the mayor decided to draw a line, literally.
The line formed a lopsided oval around eight square miles of the historic inner city. Almost anyone who drove across the line during business hours -- in fact, almost anyone who moved or even parked a car on the street within it after Feb. 17 -- instantly owed the city of London $:5 (about $8) a day for every day it happened. If a driver failed to pay, one of more than 700 vulturelike video cameras perched throughout the zone would capture his license plate number and relay it to a computer, leading to a huge fine. And if the driver declined to pay those fines? The mayor vowed, only half-jokingly, that the city would relentlessly track his car down, clamp it, tow it away and crush it -- ''with or without the driver inside.'' Few would be exempt, not even volunteer social workers, teachers, foreign diplomats or undercover police officers.
The idea behind his assault on automotive freedom was neither new nor very hard to understand. If a finite resource is free, human beings tend to use it all up, regardless of the consequences. If it has a cost, they tend to use it more rationally. Livingstone, a far-left Socialist, won his mayoralty largely on the promise of applying this tough-love theory to London's streets.
Yeah, like I could see this working in Houston, right? Still, Livingstone does have some novel ideas, and this whole thing is just crazy enough to work. It makes a hell of a lot more sense than my solution. Me? I'd just go out and buy the biggest damn SUV I could find. This is why I'm not Mayor of London.