London has a congestion charge – and traffic in gridlock. We need other ways to end the obsession with cars | Jonn Elledge

11 hours ago 1

There was a moment, during the long, strange summer of 2020, when it felt like Covid might reshape London, as it seemed set to change so much else. The streets of the capital, so long given over to dangerous metal boxes spewing out fumes, felt open to human life once again. Main streets were closed to private traffic; and an abundance of new low-traffic neighbourhoods (LTNs) and cycle lanes appeared. When the world reopened, the bars and restaurants of Soho began spilling out into the semi-pedestrianised streets.

But this, as with so many of the changes wreaked by the pandemic, turned out to be a mirage. Westminster council removed traffic restrictions in Soho, while Kensington and Chelsea ripped out a brand new cycle lane. Low-traffic neighbourhoods, meanwhile, brought the English closer to civil war than Brexit ever managed. The car remained king after all.

Twenty-two years after its congestion charge was introduced, London is somehow the most congested city in Europe. Drivers in the capital spent an average of 101 hours of 2024 stuck in traffic – contrast that with how many hours of last year you spent doing anything you enjoy – compared with 97 hours in Paris, and 81 in third-placed Dublin. Nowhere else in the UK came close: the second-most congested was Bristol, whose roads held drivers static for a mere 65 hours.

The capital’s situation has deteriorated, with London’s average traffic hours up from 99 the year before, and 97 the year before that. In Manchester, congestion is getting worse even faster, with a 13% increase in delays. Inrix, the transport analytics company behind this new research, calculated that the cost to London’s economy was about £3.85bn, equivalent to £942 for each of the city’s 4 million drivers.

The biggest question raised here must be: who on earth is choosing to drive in London, the city with by far the best public transport system in Britain? Of course, some of those using the capital’s streets will be tradespeople, delivery drivers, people with mobility issues, or others whose journeys are unavoidable. The numbers will be juiced, too, by Inrix’s expansive definition of “London”: among the most congested roads in the capital, it lists a 7-mile stretch of the M25. That, though, seems hardly sufficient to explain why the worst traffic in Europe should be found in a city with one of the most extensive public transport systems in the world.

What is to be done to clean up the roads? One solution that has frequently been touted, in London as elsewhere, is to build more of them. Some, like the Silvertown tunnel, opening this April to relieve the Blackwall tunnel, have been given the go-ahead. Others, like the ghastly 1960s plans for an eight-lane “motorway box” that would have smashed through Brixton and Islington, thankfully have not. As mayor, Boris Johnson proposed his own version of this plan, which would have reduced the impact slightly by putting the roads underground. Fortunately it never happened, for the same reasons of expense and physical impossibility that ruined most of his grands projets.

Such schemes are never likely to solve things, thanks to the well-attested phenomenon of “induced demand”: when journeys that would previously have seemed not worth the hassle become possible, people tend to make them, and new roads quickly fill up with cars. This explains every picture you’ve ever seen of seven-lane Los Angeles highways, utterly rammed with cars. If you build roads, they will come.

The good thing about induced demand, however, is that it also works in reverse: if you make it harder to drive, people will find less aggravating, less poisonous alternatives. This, alongside simply making neighbourhoods nicer and healthier, was one of the purposes of LTNs. Other European cities have found their own ways of reducing space given over to cars: introducing “road diets”, reducing the number and width of lanes; turning riverside highways into parks in Paris; introducing “superblocks”, in essence giant, near citywide LTNs, in Barcelona.

There are other ways to make driving less attractive, too. Athens and Delhi have experimented with rules restricting the days cars can access the roads by number plate. Central London’s congestion-charging scheme could be expanded, or its price raised. Until late 2023, according to London Centric, Transport for London was considering going further: “Project Gladys” would have introduced a Singapore-style scheme that charged drivers by the mile. Such a scheme would raise costs for those who have to drive, yes – but they would also be competing for space with fewer other vehicles when they did so.

The real barriers to such schemes, alas, is the public. The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, reportedly scrapped Project Gladys over fears he would be accused of going to war against motorists. London is hardly unusual in this regard. Greater Manchester’s plan for a congestion charge was decisively defeated in a 2008 referendum, and other, weaker measures have been abandoned since. Just this week, as New York became the first city in the US to introduce a congestion charge zone, covering Lower Manhattan, a resident of the affluent Upper East Side went viral, complaining that this meant charging him to visit his kids. They live 18 blocks away.

There will always be votes in opposing restrictions on driving. Even in London, people don’t want cars off the road: they want other people’s cars off the road. We can blame congestion on politicians – but at some point we need to reckon with the fact the problem is us.