| By :
Iain Jones
Several cities worldwide (including Stockholm, Singapore and Milan) have followed the example of London and introduced a congestion zone to discourage the use of motor vehicles in city centres during peak hours. Many others (including New York) are considering doing likewise. The benefits for the city have been clearly demonstrated by the London experience. Taking London as an example, there has been a 21 per cent reduction in the volume of traffic entering the congestion zone (70,000 fewer cars a day) and a six percent increase in the usage of public transport. However, Congestion zone charges are something of a problem for fleet operators who need to cover a city such as London. It is estimated that 30,000 people forget to pay the London Congestion Charge every week. Many of these are drivers of fleet vehicles whose actions end up costing their employers a significant amount of money in fines. Although you only have to pay the charge if one of your vehicles enters the congestion zone, if they do enter it then you must remember to pay the charge or you will incur a fine. Whilst the charge in London is just £8 if paid by midnight on the day of travel, or £10 if paid by midnight the following night, failure to pay by then escalates to a £120 fine thereafter. Very often, drivers who do not regularly drive into the city may not actually realise that they have entered the zone and thus need to pay the congestion charge. Where drivers do not enter the congestion zone as a matter of routine then it would clearly be very beneficial for a fleet manager to be alerted in some way when one of his drivers has driven into the congestion zone so that he can be aware that a fee needs to be paid and thereby avoid a costly fine. To counteract the risk of drivers encroaching into a city congestion zone, many fleet operators who already use satellite GPS vehicle tracking technology for other reasons are using the same system to set up a perimeter alarm around the congestion charge. The perimeter alarm can be configured to notify the organisation each time a vehicle passes into the congestion zone, which will give plenty of time to ensure that only the minimum charge need be paid and avoid the cost of unnecessary fines. Furthermore, some businesses have taken the alert capability one step further so that when an alert is generated, the user is provided with a choice of how to make the payment. For example, this may be to pay by text message or to set up a phone call to the relevant Congestion Charge Call Centre. For a business that is already suffering from picking up congestion charge fines, it is likely that the potential savings from this alone would justify in its own right the cost of GPS vehicle tracking, not even considering all of the other cost reduction opportunities that could be available. Where a company already has GPS vehicle tracking in place, then setting up a perimeter alert around the congestion zone will be well worth the little time it would take to set up.
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