Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time

by Jeff Speck

In the early 2000s, London was choking on traffic, and people were desperate for a solution. Having exhausted the alternatives, Mayor Ken Livingstone proposed the only known cure, economics. Against “a massive and sustained media campaign,”36 he introduced a roughly fifteen-dollar fee for any driver who wanted to enter the congested heart of the city on weekdays, with the revenue to be used to support a progressive transportation agenda. Here’s what happened: Congestion dropped 30 percent in the toll zone, and typical journey times went down by 14 percent. Cycling among Londoners jumped 20 percent and air pollution fell about 12 percent. The fee has already generated over a billion dollars in revenue, much of which has been invested in mass transit. London now has hundreds of new buses, providing almost thirty thousand more daily trips than before the charge. Bus reliability has jumped by 30 percent and bus delays have dropped by 60 percent.37