Boris Watch

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Congestion Charge Report – Where’s It Gone?

October 3rd, 2009 by Tom

What’s missing in this list of Congestion Charge reports?

  • CC Impacts Monitoring First Annual Report (Jun 2003)
  • CC Impacts Monitoring Second Annual Report (Apr 2004)
  • CC Impacts Monitoring Third Annual Report (Apr 2005)
  • CC Impacts Monitoring Fourth Annual Report (Jun 2006)
  • CC Impacts Monitoring Fifth Annual Report (Jul 2007)
  • CC Impacts Monitoring Sixth Annual Report (Jul 2008)
  • ?

I can’t find the Seventh Annual Report, which given that the previous two came out in July is now getting on for three months overdue.  Since this would reflect a full year of Boris’s traffic smoothing policies, it would be rather interesting.  Perhaps they don’t want people reading disturbing things like this, from the Sixth Annual Report:

[I]f traffic levels in the western extension returned to those experienced before the introduction of charging, the congestion levels would be more severe than currently observed.

[It's not just the CC Impacts Monitoring report that's AWOL, I can't find any recent bus reliability reports for the 507 and 521, either.  Is someone cutting back on the amount of information made available to the public by TfL?]

Tags: 5 Comments

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5 responses so far ↓

  • 1 Helen Oct 3, 2009 at 8:47 pm

    Either it’s being suppressed or the Impacts Monitoring Group in the
    Congestion Charging Division of Transport for London has been disbanded as the Mayor has already dictated what the impacts were and therefore has no need of a report.

  • 2 Where_art_thou_ken Oct 6, 2009 at 2:23 pm

    Is this witholding information from the public? Has Boris removed our right to know what the impact of his policies are?

    If he has then he will undoubtedly become the most successful politician in history (because he’s writing his own version of history)

    I think Adolf Hitler and Stalin often tried similar tactics.

  • 3 Tom Oct 6, 2009 at 2:29 pm

    I’ve since received an email from TfL I’ll update the story with this evening – basically the information has been put somewhere else, and they’ve stopped doing these reports for some reason.

  • 4 Dan Nov 5, 2009 at 6:43 pm

    Hi Tom. Did you post anything about the TfL response? Just been looking for the seventh annual report without success – difficult piecing together the costs of the Congestion Charge system without it.

  • 5 Tom Nov 5, 2009 at 6:46 pm

    Oo, bum, forgot that. Will try and dig the email out later, but from memory they’d abandonded the annual reviews and folded all that into something else, possibly the big annual TfL document (the one that, amongst other things, has large underspends in many areas). Tonight extends to a month. Well, if you want professionalism, read Gilligan’s stuff, eh?