Ongoing road closures Key consultations Open TfL Public Consultations  

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Subject: Road Freight Bulletin No 87 - 30 January 2014

Advance Notice - Tube strikes If the strikes go ahead, Tube services will be affected from:

    •  About 21:30 on Tuesday 4 February until the morning of Friday 7 February

    •  About 21:30 on Tuesday 11 February until the morning of Friday 14 February

    TFL will work hard to run as many trains as possible, but please ensure that your staff are made aware to reduce disruption to your business.

    Delays may be experienced on the road network during this period - plan ahead and check for updates at http://www.tfl.gov.uk/

Congestion zone charge increase

Put the cost of congestion charge up for those who have a choice, the courier sector has no choice, we are a captive audience providing the life blood deliveries of the City.  Give us more road speed in the traffic flow and we will provide a cleaner and more efficient solution.

In the last days of January IOC were invited to consultaion by TFL on the pending increase of congestion zone charge for London. With six senior IOC fellows in attendance representing both national footprint and city of London focus the next step is a documented reply from IOC, at the same time, all fellows to rally their companies to reply to the individual company consultation questions on line.

    The IOC consultation hosted by Sean Conroy, His outline was clear, 'the purpose of the charge is to break congestion and raise revenue.'

    185 thousand vehicles a day in the zone, circa fifty percent of those are exempt of charge, from public transport vehicles to motorcycles.

    TFL stated there was no vision to begin charging motorcycles. With fifty per cent of vehicles already exempt there were no new catgeories of exemption expected.

    We are back at pre-congestion charge traffic speeds.

Since congestion charge arrived the average traffic speed has marginally fallen even lower to just under nine miles per hour, London is growing, there are of course increases of overaul traffic issues and a different use of road space, far more bus lanes and a great deal of new building development, London set to increase by another one point seven million souls, No solutions are easy but courier and freight is the life blood and operators have no choice but to use the roads.

Couriers are a captive audience to the congestion charge, there is no public transport solution to deliveries, out of hours delivery is not an option as the client base dictates a weight into the office day and as home delivery grows into business address targets the congestion grows. Higher traffic flow speed would increase efficiency in time, road space and reduce in carbon footprint.

As a captive audience having paid the charge a larger zone would have little further economic impact, a larger zone would surly discourage commuter cars who have choice not to use and further spread the edge of zone bottle-necks

The meeting notes

    TFL Reasons for increase

    1.        arrest increase in traffic - congestion increased since drop after first introduction, no objective numbers stated??

    2.        Congestion & revenue are objectives, not emissions reduction (except perhaps for BJ)

Questions

    Data on breakdown of CZ traffic - private vs commercial? (current % of chargeable journeys <> 50%?)

    Sensitivity on price vs volumes? In which user segments? (unknown)

    Sunset period on previous Low emission limits not applied?

Key Points raised by IOC industry group

    1.        Exemptions are discriminatory - some business types that have to work in zone get exemption - taxis/recovery/PCO

    2.        Low emission exemption meaningless to business as only applies to electric vehicles (insufficient range)

    3.        To arrest traffic increase requires attacking discretionary journeys, not obligatory journeys (courier?)

    4.        Suggested increase could be tied to increase in average traffic speeds/reduced journey times (not universal)

    5.        Suggested no increase for commercial , only private (how?)]

    6.        Reference to dramatically improved traffic flows during Olympics (is there data on CC journeys for that period?)

    7.        Slogan 'Support Business or Tax Business' with the increase?

    8.        Taxes = increased CC, parking, slow traffic=delivery costs increase

    9.        General point about traffic management - incidents/road closures/bus lanes/repair schedules - improvements here would lead to reduced congestion