Jon wrote:

John Rowland wrote:
From the maps on the cclondon website, it looks like the western extension
will include a number of cul-de-sacs, and similar, off the inside of the
cordon, for instance Blantyre Street, Childs Street, Redfield Lane, Lawrence
Street, Embankment Gardens etc. I find this hard to understand. How much
does each camera cost? Since Childs Street contains nothing but houses, all
of whose residents will qualify for the exemption, I wonder how long it will
take the Childs Street camera to pay for itself, or whether it will ever pay
for itself.

Could it be to stop people using these roads as zone-edge car parks ?

These roads will likely have (council enforced) residents only parking
restrictions in force during the weekday daytime, so they'd be pretty
useless for use as "zone-edge car parks".

However if they were excluded there could be problems with lots of
people driving down them trying to find a parking space, or driving
down them with some sort of "I've found a chink in the CC armour and
can get in/out the zone for free" logic. All these people would of
course have to turn round soon enough but they could be a substantial
irritant.

As I said in an earlier reply, it's far simpler and clearer to include
them in the zone.


Wll they be fitted with cameras or just visited occasionally by a
warden ?


A very good question that gets to the core of the OP's point. As John
says it could be argued that cameras at these locations are not worth
the money. Without having seen the internal plans I guess the answer to
that is to wait and see whether cameras are installed at these
locations in the coming months (if they're not already there).

Incidentally mobile CC enforcement isn't done by wardens but by vans
with cameras attached to the top of them. These vans are white and may
or may not have congestion charging logos and wording displayed signs
attached (AIUI they are just magnetic signs), presumably utilising a
bit of the "give them a bit of a scare" logic of the marked TV licence
'detector vans' that prowl the streets.

(I've read many, if not most 'detector vans' were/are fakes, though
there was at least one real van. It should be stated that as far as
anyone is aware the CC camera vans are not fake, though I remember an
Evening Standard reporter going undercover working in one who said that
the automatic number plate recognition on the vans computers didn't
work well at all - things may have changed, of course, and those
problems could be put down to initial glitches or poor operator
training.)

Such a van could park on one of these cul-de-sacs and monitor it
occasionally - remember that a car only has to pay the CC if it's
moving in the zone, so merely taking down the reg numbers of parked
cars in the zone is useless.