| Issue
290 |
October
16, 2000 |
Looking To London: Truck Ban in Transition
In addition to roadway pricing, the question of how to strengthen and
improve the fifteen year-old night-time and weekend ban of large trucks
from Greater London area roads was a central issue in London's first
mayoral campaign last May. As then leader of the now-defunct Greater London
Council, Independent mayoral candidate Ken Livingstone pushed through a
traffic order in 1985 that prohibited all vehicles weighing over 16.5 tons
from entering an area that includes the City of London as well as the Outer
London boroughs between 9pm and 7am on weekdays and between noon on Saturday
and 7 am on Monday. (Local authorities were given the right to regulate
truck traffic by Parliament in 1984.) Under the ban, firms can petition
to pay for a special permit to enter the city during prohibited hours.
While originally conceived as a measure to reduce night-time noise and
truck traffic in residential areas, the ban has increasingly come under
fire for contributing to congestion during the peak week-day hours.
Conservative mayoral candidate, Steve Norris, who eventually lost to Livingstone,
campaigned to radically reform the ban, allowing trucks to deliver and
pick-up goods during restricted night-time hours, but banning them from
most Greater London roads the weekday peak hours. The Greater London Authority
Act grants the Mayor wide-ranging regulatory power over traffic within
the city limits, but little has been heard from Livingstone since his election
on what he might do to solve the truck ban's inadequacies.
