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London Mayor Ken Livingstone is secretly planning to roll congestion charging out across London, claims the Times , citing a source "close to Mr Livingstone." Livingstone's manifesto for the upcoming mayoral election makes no mention of such a plan, but it does refer to a "new, hassle-free system for paying the congestion charge, which will enable drivers to choose to have payments automatically debited when they enter the charging zone."

This is the tag and beacon system that Transport for London has been testing. Such systems consist of roadside monitoring devices which pick up an ID from passing vehicles and charge accordingly. They're fairly widely used in tolling systems throughout the world, and although they could be used for charging for entry to areas such as the current London Congestion Charge zone (which recently magically transformed itself into a low emissions zone), they also facilitate charging based on distance covered and the nature of the roads used. Tag and beacon systems still have to implement some form of enforcement mechanism, typically an Automatic Number Plate recognition system that logs vehicles that don't have valid tags, but they are inherently more flexible and potentially more pervasive than the ANPR monitoring used by the current congestion charge, which logs all vehicles going into the zone.

Transport Secretary Ruth Kelly's alternative plans for the rollout of smart road infrastructure do however, as The Register pointed out, facilitate the implementation of future road pricing systems based on - tag and beacon. ®

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