Driving into a congested city area during peak hours for shopping or work won’t be free. Soon, you may have to pay “congestion charge”. The Union Urban Development department has recently written a letter to chief secretaries of states to introduce ‘congestion charge’ in Indian cities. The concept of congestion charge is relatively unknown in India. However, it is effectively implemented in cities like London, New York, Milan and some areas in Singapore. Vehicles driven into congested areas of a city will have to pay an ‘entry fee’ or heavy parking charges. The congestion charge will deter people from taking private vehicles to congested areas and encourage them to use public transport. This will reduce traffic flow.
The letter written by Sudhir Krishna, secretary, Ministry of Urban Development, states, “...Now-a-days mobility in our cities either big or medium, is a huge challenge due to congestion during peak hours which is mainly due to excessive use of private vehicles. There is a need to resolve the congestion issues urgently for improving mobility of the people. The problem of congestion may be partly resolved by adopting Transport Demand Management (TDM) strategies to ensure that the economic development of our cities is decoupled from excessive motorisation by encouraging investments in sustainable transports...”
The letter was sent along with the case studies of London and Singapore. With the levying of the charge, traffic in Central London went down by about 21% and the speedwent up by about 10%.
The congestion pricing is premised on a basic concept—”charge a price in order to allocate a scarce resource to its most valuable use”. “To start with, we may have the manual permit, coupon system as was done in Singapore when it introduced congestion pricing for the first time. London has a congestion charge for about 20sq km area focused on the city centre using automatic number plate recognition cameras at 348 entry sites around the city cent re. Users pay via website, text message or at specific stores. They incur heavy fines if they do not pay,” the letter states.