Dartford Crossing

The Dartford Crossing

Dartford. Not, perhaps, a place name to stand alongside Paris, London or New York in terms of glamour, but it has its claims to fame. At any rate, a couple more than its twin town of Namyangju in South Korea.

It was, for one, the birthplace of both Sir Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, and the Rolling Stones are generally said to have been founded on its railway station platform. The band’s name is appropriate, because one thing Dartford has always been associated with is transport, from the moment the Romans constructed a crossing there while building Watling Street, their main road from Dover to London.

Nowadays, that’s the Dartford Crossing, which since 1991 has consisted of the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge (if you’re going south) and the twin Dartford Tunnels (if you’re heading north). And it’s when it comes to that bit of road infrastructure that a lot of motorists may be inclined to invoke the name of Dartford’s other great musical export, the DJ Pete Tong.

The Dartford Crossing has a toll. Almost a year ago, the booths with attendants and the buckets into which you chucked your coins were removed in favour of an online-only system. This, as you can imagine, has been Good News with capital letters when it comes to reducing queues – something I can vouch for from a recent trip.

But this is also where “it’s gone Pete Tong”, a phrase that has become rhyming slang for “it’s gone a bit wrong”, comes in. Gone wrong, in fact, to the point where a million drivers were caught out in the first six months and presented with fines. And while only four per cent appealed them, of those who did, eight out of ten drivers had their complaints upheld.

To put it bluntly, the removal of the barriers has not been good news for motorists who don’t realize that there is a toll. And the objective observer would have to say that they have a point. True, there are a few signs with a large C on them as you approach the bridge on the M25 heading south. But the M25, as you may know, is London’s orbital motorway and, as you may also know, central London has a congestion charge which is indicated by large signs bearing the letter C.

You may know that. But there’s no particular reason why drivers from other parts of the country would know that the Dartford Crossing has a toll. You might well assume that, since you’re not going to London, that big C doesn’t apply to you. It even turns out that 87 per cent of Londoners have been confused – while an extraordinary 28 per cent of them are unaware of the Dartford toll at all.

It might, then, seem a bit unfair to expect drivers from Newcastle or Glasgow or some other part of the UK – let alone European drivers going back to the Continent – to know what’s going on. In fact, since the Highway Code doesn’t even recognize a huge C as a road sign at all, you might think anything at all. Perhaps it’s the number of Roman miles on Watling Street from Dartford to Dover.

To be fair, there are some other signs. They say something like: “Find us online. You have 24 hours to pay.” Leaving aside the rather oblique wording of this message, I can tell you that the reason I don’t know the exact wording is that it’s very easy to miss them when you’re behind the wheel.

For a start, you’re going across an extremely dramatic 500-ft high cable bridge for the best part of a kilometer, very possibly ooh-ing and ah-ing if you don’t often travel on this bit of road. Then, when you reach the other side, you’re busy trying to work out which lane you should be in for the A2 or the M20 or to avoid taking the road back towards Bexleyheath, where you don’t want to go. Particularly not if that C does mean congestion charge, and it applies in Bexleyheath, which you vaguely think might be in London.

Of course, like most online things, the £2.50 toll is easy to pay if you know how, and straightforward to set up; it can be done on the phone any time before or up to 24 hours after you cross. (Though not while you’re driving, please.) Given the efficiencies it offers drivers in terms of traffic and, no doubt, the cost savings it creates for Highways England which, with the French company Sanef, runs the crossing, you’d normally say it was Good News.

But, as no less an authority than the Bible tells us, the point about Good News is that you proclaim it loudly and clearly. Unless those running the crossing make information about the toll a bit more obvious on the road, people are bound to have the unworthy suspicion that the whole thing is deliberately designed to catch them out and raise extra revenue. Since that would be in nobody’s best interest, how about a few, bigger, clearer signs?

 

 

Read more…