Oxford has recently introduced quite a unique Congestion charge to its City, where It is not a zone, but driving through specific areas. Almost all of the city can be accessed without paying this charge.
Residents can apply for free passes, and Blue badge holders (i think), and commercial vehicles like vans and HGV’s are exempt from the fees.
A user on Reddit (sjgower) also created the below map to better explain the areas you can access in each zone, and is far better than any official map released so far:
I have already had a discussion in one of the Discord groups about ways of tackling this unusual scheme.
Some suggestions have been to make short sections of roads toll roads, or a point with fee=yes, then add conditionals for the times of day, permit requirements, exempt vehicles etc.
Also maybe some input if there is anyone here still from Oxford (I moved away some 20 years ago) who may already be working on a plan.
So If I’m reading this correctly, there isn’t actually a fee to enter the areas themselves, you just get fined if you go through one of their camera traps and you don’t have a permit?
That sounds like it just needs an access tag on a small length of that road saying something like:
Although I don’t see the £5 daily permit on the council website so maybe it doesn’t actually count as permit as that’s meant to be “routinely granted to everyone requesting it”.
Do we have something like a residents_permit value? I know some places where it would be helpful for parking restrictions. permit=residents seems to undermine the main definition it a little too much to be in the spirit of the original tag.
The £5 option is a toll payable online by midnight the following day, similar to many low emission zones around the country. Not sure if that helps identify the correct tags
There is a resident permit scheme, bit it is limited to something like 100 “free” days for residents inside Oxford, 50 days for people who live close to oxford, and 25 for a larger area. What this catchment area is, I am not sure.
The £5 is a fee at the end of the day if you drive through one of these without already having a permit. So it still means anyone can drive through them, but they will have to pay online.
As there’s only one class restricted I’d stick with only tagging for that class, motorcar. There’s a lot of exceptions - basically everything Under “Land-based transportation” in the wiki
But I don’t know exactly how to tag the toll with time exceptions/etc
I just looked at the dropoff areas for Heathrow as I think they charge for that in a similar manner.
Some have no fee marked at all, but the Terminal 5 dropoff lane has: toll=yes charge=5 GBP motorcar=yes operator=Heathrow Airport Holdings operator:type=private ownership=private
In this case I think it would be toll:motorcar=yes if this is the best option?
There’s also documentation in the wiki for indicating a charge:conditional and what the fine is.
I don’t know what router support there is for time based tolls, but I suspect it isn’t great. Time based access restrictions might be have better support? The other thing I don’t like about the toll tagging is that I doubt it will have the “feel” of a toll road in person and if Oxfordshire County Council is like other councils they’ll probably make the signage as small as they can legally get away with to try to increase their fine revenue in which case I’d rather the road was just tagged as inaccessible to me without a permit and take the detour.
