America vs. the Congestion Charge…

Oh, and there is no second to the comments above… too much caffeine…
Side Note: San Francisco tried to test out roundabouts near Haight Street a while back to have folks reduce speed through neighborhood intersections. Drivers went batty trying to deal with the whole right-of-way issue — it’s like no one knew what to do when they came to one of these. Sadly, the experiment got pulled and this probably won’t happen. Back to regularly-scheduled rolling stops.

By conventional definitions I would say this is a tax, therefore Vienna Conventions apply. It *is* a tax, designed to tax traffic off the road system. It is most certainly not a “service.” I’d be open to counterarguments, but saying it’s not a tax seems like a stretch to me. It’s certainly a levied “fee.” That doesn’t mean you really get a “service” in return. Seems to me they should really just decide whether it’s a tax or a service and then at least apply the rules uniformly across the pond. Problem is really if you call this a ‘service’ then government can make up a prohibition for just about anything it wants and force you you to pay to access what you’ve already paid for (via taxes) and call that access fee a “service.” No it’s not, it’s another tax!
Ludicrous really. I don’t mind if Londoners need some money from the American government for services rendered, but the argument that it’s a “service” bothers me.

Only the obscenely rich need to drive into central London? You might find some disagreement from the million or so people who live in south London, half a hour’s walk from the nearest train station, (last train at 11:30 at night, just as the curtain goes down and anyway surrounded by a residents permit zone) and would like to go to the theatre, or a concert, or eat out in a decent restaurant, without paying ¬£30-50 to a cabbie or spending half an hour waiting for a night bus in the rain, and hour driving down the walworth road and then another half hour walking home in the dark…
I’m sure you’re not really an Ignorant, patronising, elitist idiot. But you do a good impression.

Well of course the congestion charge doesn’t apply at that time of night – only being functional until six in the evening… Sorry I gave the impression that I was down on everyone driving in London – I thought I said that I’d never met anyone who complains about the congestion charge apart from the rich who want to drive in down during the day.

NYC cracked down on diplomats abusing the parking rules in Manhattan near the United Nations…their auto registrations now get revoked if they don’t pay parking tickets.

Hmmm, my understanding was that congestion charges were taxes. I thought this was a similar situation like taxes on tobacco and booze to discourage “bad” behavior. Calling it a “service” seems a bit spurious, but if you folks want to call it that, it seems like we should pay, and the Germans too. It’s not like we’re running out of money what with our war in Iraq and rebuilding the Gulf Coast and…oh wait…Maybe all the British mission staff should retaliate by bashing through toll barriers in the US?

As has been hinted, there’s an obvious — and, dare I say, diplomatic — solution: move the US Embassy to Uxbridge. It’s a blight on Grosvenor Square, looking like it’s been dropped in from East Berlin. It was an ugly pile of concrete even before the razor wire and concrete blocks. Get the Americans to move to a nice office park in Zone 6, and you’ve solved the problem. (Moving the ambassador’s residence there too would help.)
I’m mostly convinced by the argument that every diplomat in the US has to pay road tolls and bridge tolls, and that this is the same – but maybe I’m wrong.
There’s an ongoing controversy over whether diplomats have to pay parking tickets in DC and New York (especially around the UN building), but that’s a different issue. I sincerely doubt they get waved through the toll booths: and there are a lot of them in that part of the world.

Should the visiting Americans pay their bills, or are they being held subject to a whole new set of taxations without representation?
i’m just going to overlook the whole congestion charge hoo-hah to point the following out:
i live here. i work here. i pay taxes here. can i vote here? no, my brothers and sisters, i cannot. as an american i am outraged OUTRAGED at being taxed without having a voice in where my tax dollars…er…pounds are spent.
taxation without representation? it’s all part of being a filthy immigrant, i suppose.

Phil,
Yes, you can take the tube, but I don’t think they are offering armored and surveillence-proof carriages complete with bodyguards, are they? That’s what I meant. A diplomatic vehicle is not always an ordinary car, and certain jobs require those features.

Anyway, the relevant parts of the Vienna convention are Articles 34 and 49 with contention centering on subsection e, which states that embassy staff must pay “charges levied for a specific service rendered.”
If the congestion charge revenues are not reinvested into roads in central London, then the embassy is correct that it is a general tax. However, if the revenues are reserved specifically for roads in the congestion zone, then it is a cordon toll with congestion benefits, and the city of London is correct. A recent BBC article says that it is all reserved for roads, but it does not mention if those roads are within the cordon. Perhaps someone else can shed some light on this?

You’re right that this story hasn’t hit the US yet, but we’ve been living with this kind of thing for decades. Ever since the United Nations HQ was built in New York City, they’ve had an impossible time getting diplomats to pay parking fines. I haven’t heard anything about this in a few years, so maybe they’ve resolved it, but in the 1980s you used to always hear about internationals (particularly Russians) parking badly and not rendering unto Caesar in return.

Oh, I’m in complete agreement with you, Tom. They should pay the charges or move the embassy. However, I suspect the funds are being misapplied, or America and Germany would never have bothered to mention it.
At the press conference this morning, Foggy Bottom said they were in negotiations with the UK on the matter, and they pointedly dismissed Livingstone as an inappropriate channel of communincation. If they can’t agree, let the ICJ decide.

couldn’t care less about whether they pay or not, but I do know that we need one of those congestion charges here in NY! Then we can work out some reciprocal diplomatic crap and let it be over…

A hell of a lot of people do work at that embassy and they’re not all ferried around in chauffered bullet-proof vehicles. Because they are English contractors and employees. They don’t have CD plates. So how many evil Americans and, oh yes, Germans are actually scudding down the glorious streets of plucky London free of charge?

I’m with you on the small businesses on the periphery of the Congestion Charge zone — but then I guess there are always issues and injustices wherever there are boundaries, whether we’re talking in concrete or abstract terms.
As for whether the Americans should pay, I’m at a loss; I don’t suppose it really matters what we think anyway. All international relations are ultimately Realpolitik. I just like the image of Ken Livingstone following in the footsteps of George Galloway and going to the Senate with this one.

Surveillance protected cars? How do these diplomats get fined in the first place? There is a bigger problem here.
We’ve already redefined “tax” lets not redefine “surveillance”. Having your movements logged by number plate recognition is surveillance and I rather think those enforcement cameras and mobile camera vans would make the diplomats nervous enough. Having fines sent by Royal Mail is likely to upset a few security people.
I say we give diplomats a break unless and until the secret services need to get involved. In which case they use appropriate techniques which don’t advertise the target’s movements to all and sundry civil servants.

If this was just about the rich, it’d be fine with me. But the congestion charge, like other flat taxes, is non-progressive. Unlike income tax, the C charge is assessed equally against the wealthy and the poor. That means that as between a wealthy person who wants to drive in London and a poor person who wants to drive in London, where all other factors are equal, the C charge punishes the poor person more than the rich person.
The C charge’s rate is an arbitrary sum set to act as a disincentive to drive in London. For someone to whom 8 quid is nothing, it is no disincentive at all. To someone to whom 8 quid is everything, the C charge is a near-total disincentive.
A sliding, income-based scale would apply the same disincentive to every user of the system. By fixing the rate without regard to income, the system is stacked in favor of the rich.

As for the comments about stealth tax and not being about Kyoto, I agree to a point but only to a point.
Yes this British government is about squeezing every penny but the question in hand I believe is one of the exceptions to the rule, and the revenue was only an added benefit. The problem was at a point where something did have to be done, and Kyoto means that the government does have to be seen to be making progress towards the aims of the agreement. As much as I hate the man, I think Blair believes in Kyoto and sees it as one of his precious policies. (As it will make him look good in history books)
As for comments for taxation without representation. I think you will find theres many British people who CAN vote who feel the same. Tony Blair’s leaderships is currently more of a dicatatorship than representation of the public. Just ask the people who protested at the Iraq war and were promptly ignored. I know this is off topic, but the way the British electoral system works means that the idea of representation is something of a myth. And the American system isn’t much better.

Show me a Government that isn’t all about squeezing every last penny….

I’m a bit late to the dance, here, so I see (at least) two people already discussed the issue diplomats in the US refusing to pay parking tickets. It is my belief, and hope, that those with diplomatic status are serving at their posts to allow a reasonably accurate and sensitive exchange of information and values between societies. Diplomats are invited and hosted, and I believe they should be extended every benefit accorded a guest of state.
Situations like the complete lack of parking in NYC or proper roadways through London are preexisting conditions, and stategies for allowing diplomats to handle them should be made by the host state. Charging a dimplomat, or an entire diplomatic service, with creating this situation is quite simply backward.
As I now disclaim that I have not the Geneva documents, I can clearly see the need to produce a legal grey area in which diplomats may operate. I also suppose that, given the shear number of taxes and fees and tolls and tickets and fines that one encounters daily, an effective diplomat must simply bite her tongue and deal with many of them. Stopping at a tollbooth to discuss one’s diplomatic status in the hopes of avoiding a two dollar payment is likely not occur except under the most extreme circumstances. To buy a slice of pizza, I assume a British diplomat would not dispute the several percent tax on prepared foods in most US states. Likewise, I would expect American diplomats to pay VAT on gasoline or cheese or whatever is you people charge VAT on. When conflict is easily avoidable, as it appears to be in the case of identifying an automobile as intended for diplomatic use, either physcially or in a database, why would the host state not take the proper steps to manage the situation?

Ian, if the government wants to ban private automobile ownership, they should.
Otherwise, if this program is intended to change the calculus that a car owner computes in determining whether to operate a vehicle in town, the weight on the “no” side should be the same for all users.
Unquestionably, there are some socially beneficial purposes for operating a private vehicle. Maximizing these while minimizing other uses is the purpose of an incentive/disinventive program like the C charge.
The objective here is to make driving a car less attractive to all users. But a flat fee makes cars far less attractive to poor people than it does to rich people. Unless poor peoples’ car use is less likely to be socially beneficial than rich peoples’ car use, then this incentive program will fail at maximizing good uses and minimizing bad uses. Instead, it will minimize most use by poor people (including, potentially, uses that are socially beneficial) and have little impact on rich people.
Indeed, to have the desired effect on rich people, the fee would likely have to be set *very* high (say, if driving in town was intended to cost 0.5% of your monthly net income). At that level, it would likely eliminate all users of the road save the very wealthy, which is sub-optimal.
However, a sliding scale that provides as close to an equal disincentive to all users would solve these problems.
Regarding poor peoples’ cars being worse polluters: firstly, this is intended to relieve congestion as well as pollution, and so emissions are not the whole story; secondly, if there are cars that emit beyond a safe or desirable threshhold, then they should be taken off the road altogether through a direct programme of inspection and certification. Removing polluters by burdening the poor is likely to be far less effective at controlling emissions than an emission-reduction programme.

Good point made by Cory – since 1997 when new labour came to power, poor people are being taxed more (as a proportion of income) than rich people, due to a large extent to non-income related taxes (council tax being one).

Even though I support the congestion charge I think Cory’s right about the problems with the scheme, considered as a tax, not being progressive. Unfortunately there’s a couple of practical problems: First off, and probably most fundamentally, how do you measure disincentive? Second, implementing a non flat rate whould have some serious implementation issues, do you really want to be creating a database to store all the about car registration and a persons monetary worth? And what if a rich person is borrowing a poor persons car?
Of course none of this is a problem if you think of the congestion charge as a fee for services, I don’t think many people would suggest that bus and tube fares, for example, should be determined by your ability to pay.

It does come up in NYC from time to time, but you only hear about it when the city eventually gets fucked off with the freeloaders and starts impounding cars.
Me, I’m from London. Tow ’em and let the fuckers pick up their cars from a breaker’s yard in Mile End. Tell you what – we’ll crush them to the size of a minibar so you can drag them back to Grosvenor Square on the 25 bus. Which, by the way, now takes less than 2 hours to get there because we brought the congestion charge in.
Wankers.
To Cory: Welcome to London. We don’t consider it to have anything to do with ‘chasing poor people off the road’. Central London road space is a scarce resource. Bus users pay for it. Car users did not. We simply stopped letting lone car users take up the same space as 38 bus-riding commuters for free.
Oh and on an unrelated matter – *we* all call it Lego, not “legos”. So if you’d stop calling us all corporate whores for that, I’d appreciate it.

Also: I never once said or wrote one single word about people who call the item “Lego.” I commented on the company’s insistence that people use that term.

It depends how you define “poor.” Most poor Londoners do not have cars, so Cory may be referring to an almost non-existent segment of the population. Those who were driving into Central London before the C-Charge could already afford very high parking rates, so probably were not “poor” by most conventional definitions.

Quick responses to some people – I have never heard a native Briton use the word Legos except either in conversation with Americans or in order to talk about how weird it is that Americans say “Legos”. I didn’t even know that there was such a word as Legos until I was about twenty-five / twenty-six. I’d suggest that if Britons do say legos they do so pretty rarely.
The other poing that people are making – that almost everyone who works in Central London uses public transport, that parking is enormously expensive in Central London and that it seems a bit random to talk about the congestion charge penalising the poor – seems conceptually wrong, but pragmatically true. For the most part it was always a small proportion of the middle classes and a larger proportion of the rich who drove in Central London and – if you listen to some of the rhetoric around the time it was launched – many of the latter declared it abhorrent that they’d have to go on public transport with common people.
But obviously this is not totally true, and – as someone has pointed out above – there are parts of the city worse served by public transport where car ownership and driving is much more common – including much of South London.
In the end though, given that the congestion charge is reinvested into public transport in London, and that it makes public transport and the buses in London run much faster – I can’t help thinking that on aggregate it disproportionately benefits the poor, precisely the people who would not have normally driven. It seems to me difficult to argue that as a taxation of a purely regressive nature

Many are referencing Cory’s point, but why are we focused on this charge’s effects on the poor? Do not the poor and the rich pay the same for a litre of gas and all its attendant taxes? What about cigarettes, and those taxes? I’ll bet, too, that the rich aren’t forced to buy milk at a higher rate. The cost of doing business is so much higher, in proportion, for poor than rich people that it hardly deserves mention in this discussion- no offense to Cory.
For many Americans, at least, the costs of housing, utilities, food, and transportation almost completely drain the monthly funds. Sometimes, the poor cannot do this, even. The rich require no more than the basics to survive, and the remainder is what makes them rich. This, my friends, is the salient point when discussing taxation and wealth. It’s not how much you make or spend, but how much you save, that builds wealth.

here is a road with lots of cars. if someone gets rid of some of the cars so that the remaining cars (and all of the buses) can move around better, aren’t they providing a service? especially if in so doing, they generate funds to improve public transport?

This whole thread has great comic timing. Each time it looks like dying suddenly it’s pow! and we’re head-to-head on the nomenclature of plastic bricks or something. Cap it with an example of Godwin’s Law and I think we can agree to call this one a classic.
Oh, and thank you – I’ve only ever seen “legos” written by Cory Doctorow until now.

As if the rest of the world doesn’t already think we’re all a bunch of jack*sses…
I think the analogy about U.S. Tolls is dead on. And according to an earlier comment; shouldn’t all tolls be considered taxes and not paid by diplomats?
Yet again I am ashamed of the behavior or my fellow US citizens abroad (it’s bad enough that they act like d*ckheads at home)…

this story is now really getting around. and all the comments and details are interesting and relevant (ie. the true definition of a ‘tax’). but what most people will get from it is that once again amercians are shirking their responsibilty to help clean up this planet. whether that is true or not, detail by detail, that is how it looks. and it looks bad.

OK, I haven’t read every other response, so forgive me if I repeat anyone else.
Speaking as a resident of Washington, DC, I’d like to apologize on behalf of my country for this one. The citizens of this city (that is, the normal working people who don’t end up on the news) have to endure all kinds of crap from diplomats from everywhere. I would LIKE to think we’d try to behave BETTER when in another country. Apparently not.
Please understand that these people only represent us diplomatically. They are as far removed from the average American person as you might be from your own diplomats. And since we’re not exactly thrilled with the politicians who appointed them, they represent us even less.
Since GB is one of the few allies we have left, it just makes sense to pay the damn tickets and move on. Sorry.

A U.S. Embassy spokeswoman said the embassy had only stopped paying the fee from July 1, when it was increased from £5 ($8.73) to £8 ($13.96). РCNN
Their principled stance seems to be based on the value of the charge rather than the nature of it.

Am I the *only* person who realized that this isn’t just Americans? Everyone always likes to blame America for everything, but in the lede of the BBC story it clearly says that this is going on with the German diplomats, too – who were told by their government in Berlin not to pay.
I just love how everyone’s so quick to cry foul on Americans, but no one gives a hoot about anyone else doing the exact same thing. Shame! Maybe this is the reason why Americans are so defensive about everything?
Anthony Baker – I’ve used roundabouts (traffic circles/rotaries) many, many times in my life. There are some in Washington, D.C., where I grew up, and many in New England, where I spent a lot of time in my childhood. There were three on the campus of my university (in America, no less)! Everyone I’ve encountered seems to know how to use them…?

the significant difference Tom, although not what you meant I know, is that a road toll is collected at some sort of barrier – either by a person or a machine that won’t let you through otherwise…
This isn’t always true. Toll roads in Toronto send bills based on the registration of the license plate, similar to the London congestion charge, with discounts for frequent users who prepay and carry a transponder.
My view is that it’s simple enough to just deny them the service that they’re not paying for. Set up toll booths on the UK side of the embassy wall, and only allow cars through that have paid up.

Seems like a road-use tax to me. It also seems a trifle regressive, because I bet that corporate people are allowed to take the fees from their companies petty cash funds, or as a privilege of their office.
It also seems like a great idea for places like Mexico City, where every other attempt to reduce traffic has resulted in MORE traffic and pollution.
Of course, in Mexico city, everyone would ignore the fines. The English are famous for paying invasive seeming fines. After all, if you own a television, of COURSE you have to pay a tv tax.
Do diplomats have to pay the city use tax? Probably not. Are most of them doing it? Probably not. Just like they routinely ignore traffic tickets.

Contrary to what you wrote above, I don’t know who you’ve been talking to, but there are a lot of Londoners who do complain about paying the congestion charge. There are many who cannot afford it and whose only alternative is to rely on temperamental (and in some cases incompetent) bus drivers and tubes (always on the brink of being shut down because somebody or other is on strike) to get them where they need to go. There are also other embassies that do not pay the charge simply because they cannot afford to pay it (especially after the increase from ¬£5 to ¬£8). By the way, what service are we Londoners getting in return for this charge? I pay over ¬£40 per month to use buses driven by people who should never have been given a license in the 1st place; there is traffic all over the place and if I catch the tube at the wrong time, I could get stuck trying to find a line that actually works. Not a tax my toosh!!

So the revenue from all this congestion charge balony goes were exactly? If for example a mere 20% was allocated to the N.H.S for better care for our comunity i’m sure a few more hard working gentry would’nt mind parting with their hard earned cash. I for one am a low level earner, i lose approximately one third of my income to this taxation and for what? Fat cats boosting their annual growth and profits…i hope all in favour of this congestion charge lose all their hair and turn fat and ugly.

Wish we Londoners could do the same. Just ignore it like the American Diplomats do. Especially those of us that use less than 20 metres of CC road before heading out of London (camera just on the boundary), and don’t drive often enough to qualify for the 90% discount.
The system is very unfair for many residents who only wish to drive out of London by private car, but on a very infrequent basis.