"Walter Briscoe" wrote:

This morning's 0655 BBC London news says that BorisBikes will be
available to casual users from the third of December.
I failed to find the relevant press release.

However, I did find:
http://www.tfl.gov.uk/roadusers/congestioncharging/17096.aspx
I expect this to provide a significant improvement.

Currently, if you don't make manual arrangements to pay the CC and incur
a congestion charge, you incur a penalty charge.
I live within the Congestion Charge area and can claim the 90% residents
discount. I pay for a year in advance to avoid that Penalty Charge risk.
This modification to the scheme will mean I won't need to do so.

For me, these are 2 improvements.


Blimey, not sure the number heavy subject line does much for
reader-friendliness (sorry!) - you're not a coder are you perchance?

The coming of casual user access for the 'Boris bikes' is welcome - though
I'd imagine that a whole host of new potential issues will now open up, not
least because this change will effectively open up what has up until now
been a relatively closed system.

With regards to CC Auto Pay - this isn't a brand new idea on the scene, it
was certainly around in the summer during the statutory consultation on
changes to the CC (i.e. removal of the Western Extension) and I think it was
first publicly floated by TfL before that.

However the £10 annual charge for registering with CC Auto Pay didn't
feature in those earlier mentions of this facility, though TBH it's quite
understandable that there is to be some sort of maintenance charge for
benefitting from it - but compared to my original (and in retrospect naive)
assumption that it'd be free to register for Auto Pay, the annual charge
does change the economics somewhat as to whether it'd be advantageous for
those who rarely drive into the CC zone during operational hours (still
rather cheaper than a single penalty charge notice of course!).

It's also noteworthy that (for non residents) the new standard charge from 4
Jan 2011 will be £10, whilst those paying by CC Auto Pay will pay a reduced
charge of £9 - I'm not entirely sure of the thinking behind this, but it's
worth noting that vehicles registered with 'Fleet Auto Pay' (the new name
for the fleet scheme for 10+ vehicles - which is being reduced to 6+ from
the new year) currently pay a reduced £7 charge compared the the current
standard £8 charge - so perhaps they want to align the CC Auto Pay charge
with that of Fleet Auto Pay, also I guess the transaction costs with CC Auto
Pay might well be lower when compared to paying the charge each day.

The other thing that interests me about this CC Auto Pay scheme is that it
will throw some light onto how effective the CC zone cameras are at
recording the number plates of all those vehicles which drive in the (to be
shrunken) zone - regular drivers into the zone should get some idea over
time as to whether they ever simply don't get detected and hence charged for
a particular day. I wonder if it might also lead to a bout of daftness such
as drivers trying to sandwich themselves between large vehicles when passing
the cameras on the zone's boundaries in the hope of blocking their number
plates, or obscuring their plates with muck or some such? My impression is
that the cameras, which face both ways, are pretty hot at catching the
plates of all vehicles which pass by them.

What perhaps might be more likely to go undetected is vehicles moving around
solely within the zone, without passing out through the zone's boundary -
e.g. if you (Walter) were to drive your car for a short trip inside the
zone. There are mobile CC camera vans that are out and about within the
zone, but I must admit I'm not sure if there are any fixed cameras which are
hooked up to the CC system - of course there are many CCTV cameras in
central London which have a traffic monitoring role, and there are the fixed
ANPR cameras on the edges of the City of London's 'ring of steel', and I'm
pretty sure there are various ANPR cameras around other 'sensitive'
locations such as Whitehall/Westminster - but I don't think any of these
feed into the CC system, and I'm not sure there are any dedicated CC cameras
*within* the zone.