The cost of a resident’s parking permit is £115 if bought online
The average price of a Pay and display parking space is £3.25 per hour.
The average occupancy rate of a parking space in the borough is 61.5%

Therefore the value of a parking space is £17,509 per annum.
3.25 x 24 x 365 x 0.615

Meaning residents with cars are subsidised £17,394 per year

Council tax is about £8-900 and further up Dave H says car ownership is less than 50%. If Westminster charged their residents just 20% of the market value of the space they could drop council tax to £0 for all residents, maybe the >50% of non car owning households would be interested in knowing this.

Residents permits – http://www.westminster.gov.uk/services/transportandstreets/parking/residentsparking/resparkhowmuchdoesitcost/
Pay and display charges – http://www.westminster.gov.uk/services/transportandstreets/parking/zones/parkingcharges/
Occupancy rates – http://transact.westminster.gov.uk/CSU/Cabinet/2011/1%20August%202011/15%20-%20Appendix%207%20-%20Executive%20Summary%20of%20the%20Westminster%20Parking%20Occupancy%20Surveys%202011.pdf

The trick with motor traffic design, it seems to me, is to have enough bottlenecks to throttle traffic on most roads. Here on the south coast we have nice bottlenecks on the A27 at Lancing, Worthing and Arundel. Consequently the A27 between these places is usually free-flowing and has plenty of space. If/when bypasses are built for these towns, I’d expect the A27 to rapidly look like the M27 or M25, consistently full of motor traffic most of the time.

Interestingly, the draft Lambeth travel plans have a hierarchy of modes, with walking at the top, followed by cycling, and the private car is at the bottom. If they genuinely intend to follow this it will make for some interesting and radical changes. Does it mean that they’ll put pedestrian crossings in at every junction? (And will they make Westminster Bridge Road a bus-only road with cycle paths down the sides? The private car is at the bottom of the hierarchy, remember!)

It seems odd that the boroughs have to pay TfL for traffic lights on borough roads. Do you know why that is? Do they have to pay for an extra 2 aspects for pedestrian signals too? Maybe that’s why Westminster is so lacking in them!

As I always say, this is a political failure. We have signalised junctions in my area where there are no green men at all or on some arms (both TfL and borough roads) – I looked at one a few years back, but the green men would have caused severe traffic congestion and so was rejected by committee.

Boris/ TfL – GLA Act 1999 brought TfL into existence (S154 onwards), their highways were set out from S259 onwards. (some of this has been altered by legislation over time). In order for TfL to take over borough roads, there would need to be a change in primary legislation transferring control to TfL. TfL has some powers over the Strategic Road Network where they are borough roads, but this tends to be from the traffic flow point of view.

Stopping up of a highway can take 2 forms. First, if planning consent is granted for a scheme which needs to build on or alter a highway, then S247 of the Town & Country Planning Act 1990 comes into play with a formal stopping up process which ends up with the control of the area reverting back to the land owner (i.e. he who owns the sub soil) – local authorities can own land on which a highway exists, but the majority (in my experience) is owned by all different people and the highway exists as a legal and physical veneer over land and is as thick as it needs to be operate a highway or for things to be place on, in or under it (such as sewers).

The other form is S117 of the Highways Act 1980 which essentially has the highway authority going to the magistrate’s court with a view that the highway is no longer needed by the public. S116 allows someone to apply to the highway authority to use its powers on their behalf, but the use of S117 is discretionary – in practice, the fact a highway may be used by the postman or have a telephone line under it will be enough to show it in use. Very seldom used.

The responsibility for the installation, operation, maintenance and management of traffic signals in London on TfL and borough roads is TfL. The boroughs all pay an annual charge based on the amount of aspects (individual “lights” – red, amber, and green = 3 aspects) in their borough. There are design standards, but essentially, the borough is responsible for the design of road layouts involving signals, plus the timings on borough roads. TfL will approve the design and then install and manage the signals after. Many layouts are pre-TfL, but the lack of a green man on a borough junction is down to the borough. Of course a proposal to introduce a green man which will cause traffic congestion may be an issue for TfL if it affects their road network or a SRN road.

I struggle to keep up half the time, so goodness knows how most users can pick their way through it all!