While the expected traffic chaos in the capital never materialised
on the first day of congestion charging, Transport for London has
warned there could be "weeks, if not months" of teething problems
with the technology underpinning the scheme.
"We would be very foolish to assume everything
would work from day one - there are bound to be some teething
problems," said a spokesman for TfL.
The spokesman admitted there had been some
problems with the phone signal via which data is transmitted from
the self-service payment kiosk. However, he said, repair "hit
squads" had been sent out to sort out any problems.
He also admitted there had been delays in
processing motorists' applications but said this was down "to the
sheer amount of applications rather than any problems with the IT"
and that "extra people had been brought in to deal with it".
The spokesman insisted there was no connection
between the hold-ups in processing the congestion charging
registrations with last year's delays in vetting teachers by the
Criminal Records Bureau. Both systems are run by IT services
company Capita.
"This is a very different system," he said. "Then there was much
more vetting than processing. I think there was a lot of politics
going on behind the scenes with the CRB system - if you remember,
the education minister resigned shortly after."
Although the back-end systems appeared to run smoothly
yesterday, the congestion charge website suffered a number of
performance issues as soon as the charge came into force, according
to network monitoring firm Parallel.
The www.cclondon.com site suffered downtime and severely reduced
performance during rush hour on 17 February when commuters jammed
the system at the last minute, Parallel said.
The company monitored the website during the critical period
from 12.00am on 16 February to 12.00am on 18 February. Key findings
include:
- The congestion charge site was available for 98.92% of the time
over the test period
- The performance changed dramatically around 8am yesterday
increasing download times by approximately three times
- At the same time it was also recorded that there were several
download timeouts - this is where the page and its contents could
not be downloaded within 45 seconds. This indicates that the
server, or its internet connection may have been overloaded between
9am and 11am
- The transaction test (which tested the first two steps to
paying the congestion charge online) also showed the same pattern
of performance problems, with the payment transaction doubling from
14 to about 28 seconds yesterday after 8am