Smeed Report

The principles laid down were that "The road user should pay the costs that he imposes upon others", namely the following: The operational requirements should be the following: The results of the radical study were reported into the then Ministry of Transport, indicating that the effect of speeding up congested traffic would benefit the country's economy by £100–£150M per annum.

A large majority enabled her to bring into law a number of the then-controversial safety concepts that the RRL had been investigating, such as speed limits and breathalyzers.

Roth, one of the authors of the report, acrimoniously left the country to join the World Bank in 1967, citing the delays and the mutation of the pricing scheme from an enabling investment-raising mechanism into a method of restriction.

"[9] After Roth analysed its congestion problems for the World Bank Singapore adopted many of the ideas originally identified in the Smeed Report, introducing its first Restricted Zone in 1975.

[11] However, this differs in some key respects from Smeed's scheme, as it relies on a system of 19 wireless AutoPASS-enabled entrypoints with toll booths, and it was not designed as a congestion charge.

[12] It was not until 2002 that the principle was re-adopted in Britain, with legislation passed to allow the first schemes to be implemented in Durham[13] and then London,[14] with consideration given to a national road pricing system.