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The Highways Agency's National Traffic Control Centre (NTCC) became fully operational in November 2003. The services provided by the control centre are key to satisfying the objectives of providing better information to travellers and ensuring more reliable journeys. This paper describes the policy context within which the control centre has been delivered; the means by which it collects data on conditions on England's motorway and all-purpose trunk road network; how those data are analysed; and the means by which information is disseminated to the general public. These services are providing the catalyst for the development of traffic information delivery tools by the Agency and private sector information providers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of analyses have been made in recent years to fit models to the separate spatial distributions of homes and workplaces over a city. This paper investigates the fit of a spatial model to the joint distribution of homes and workplaces, taking into account that home and workplace locations are interrelated. The model is expressed as a single continuous function of the home and workplace coordinates, and in its simpler form has three parameters, each with a clear physical interpretation. The model is compared with data on desire-line lengths of work-trips in London and Bristol for different modes of transport, and the results show close agreement in moat of the cases that are examined. The analyses suggest that for work trips the model can be used as a suitable approximation to the trip distribution. The model describes the spatial pattern of travel, and provides a direct estimate of the travel demand, without the need for an iterative procedure. Some implications of the model are discussed and it is shown that the model can be expressed as a continuous variable form of the standard gravity model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents information related to congestion charging in London. The main reason why congestion charging has been successfully introduced was the fact that politician Ken Livingstone was prepared to place his political future at stake in his election manifesto of 2000 and in his transport strategy for London in 2001. In most respects the congestion charging scheme has been a great success both in its immediate traffic effects and in its wider significance. Even the criticism raised concerning the impact on retailing has been muted, as any downturn in trade should be related to wider economic factors, the levels of business confidence and the threats from terrorism.