The tolls for the Silvertown Tunnel and Blackwall Tunnel have finally been confirmed – with car drivers expected to pay up to £4 from when the new crossing opens in the spring.
Transport for London’s board signed off the charges at a meeting at City Hall on Wednesday morning. The tolls are broadly the same as the ones proposed five months ago, although with an amendment to keep charges for electric vans down.
Car and small van drivers will pay £1.50 at off-peak times, and £4 during peak hours – applying northbound between 6am and 10am and southbound between 4pm and 7pm.
Motorbike riders will pay £1.50 at off-peak times or £2.50 in peak times; large van drivers will pay £2.50 or £6.50; while HGVs will be charged £5 or £10.
The two tunnels will be free to use between 10pm and 6am, while the off-peak rates will only be available to those who sign up to the TfL AutoPay system, which already manages congestion charge payments in central London and ULEZ. Charges will be reviewed after the first year and a marketing campaign will begin next month.
Tolls will be half-price for low-income residents in what TfL is calling “east London” (Greenwich, Lewisham, Bexley, Southwark, Tower Hamlets, Newham, Barking & Dagenham, Bromley, Hackney, Havering, Redbridge Waltham Forest and the City) while there will be discounts for charities, sole traders and small businesses.
The charges are expected to generate £123 million a year by the end of the decade. They will be used to pay back the £2 billion cost of building the new Silvertown Tunnel, which is being built and will be operated by Riverlinx, a private consortium, and have been in plans for the crossing since they were unveiled by Conservative mayor Boris Johnson more than a decade ago.
Riverlinx can expect to earn £70 million a year from the tolls, according to TfL board papers, with TfL expected to make about £3m in profit once interest charges and other costs are removed
Board papers indicate that TfL could receive £3m from tolls this financial year, suggesting the tunnel could open in March. Tarmac has already been laid, signs are in place and road markings are being painted on. Andy Lord, the TfL commissioner, said the tunnel was “a phenomenal feat of civil engineering”.
TfL and Labour mayor Sadiq Khan, who has championed the tunnel since entering office in 2016, will also be hoping that the tolls keep usage of the tunnels down, to avoid neighbourhoods on either side of the new crossing being swamped with traffic – a phenomenon known as “induced demand”.
The new tunnel is aimed at eliminating the notorious northbound queue for the northbound Blackwall Tunnel. Critics say the project will fail to do this and will make traffic worse elsewhere, including exacerbating southbound jams on the A102 in the evening rush hour.
It will be the first time the Blackwall Tunnel has been tolled since the original tunnel opened in 1897. A second tunnel opened in 1967 and traffic levels soon doubled – a consequence Khan hopes to avoid.
But critics fear the tolls will simply push cost-conscious drivers towards Rotherhithe Tunnel or Tower Bridge instead, causing new traffic problems – something borne out in consultation responses, with Royal Mail stating that it would avoid using the tunnels and use alternative routes to save money.
The off-peak toll for car drivers is less than the £2 charged to Dartford crossing account holders, but is twice the price during peak times.
Alex Williams, TfL’s customer director, told the meeting: “We will be tracking this, literally every day. We need to recognise that this is a big change to the east London highway network. A lot of people don’t know it’s coming, but we need to give it time to bed down because it will lead to quite a few changes in behaviour, just not around the tunnel but across the whole of east London.”
He said that TfL was trying to strike the right balance with the tolls so problems were not caused elsewhere, and that drivers would get used to them. “They will there are significant travel time savings, particularly businesses, and that it is worth the paying a modest user charge,” he said.
Khan has insisted that the new tunnel will boost public transport, but only two bus services are planned to use the tunnel at launch, of which just one – an extension of the 129 to London City Airport and Beckton – will stop close to the tunnel entrances. An express SL4 service will also run from Canary Wharf to Grove Park, with the nearest stop south of the river at the Sun-in-the-Sands roundabout.
Cross-river bus journeys on these two routes and the existing 108 through the Blackwall Tunnel will be free for the first year of the tunnel, although TfL has not offered any detail on how this will work. The tunnel will be closed to cyclists but a “cycle shuttle bus” will run instead.
The project was first announced by Johnson in 2012, although dates back to a transport strategy produced by Ken Livingstone, London’s first mayor, in 2001. It was approved in 2018. Greenwich Council originally campaigned for the tunnel to be built, but reversed its stance in 2022 – just after construction work started.
Khan told the board meeting that while the tunnel had been proposed under Johnson, “the general idea is a good one”.
“If you look at our city, in the east there are very few river crossings, and that’s an issue of social justice, the east is poorer because of a lack of river crossings,” he said. He repeated a claim about the 108 bus being the most unreliable in London, although that claim is not borne out by TfL figures.
The consultation documents reveal that Greenwich Council had pressed for tolls to be higher than bus fares and set at £10 for HGVs all day, adding that “adding reducing HGV traffic in Greenwich and promoting modal shift of freight to river and rail must be a key objective”. However, its cabinet member for equalities and culture, Ann-Marie Cousins – who was sacked last month – sent her own response, objecting to the charges.
Lewisham Council also said the charges were too low, but Conservative-run Bexley said the tolls “would create a two-tier city and increase inequalities” and called for wider discounts for all residents, including those in its borough.
Updated at 1pm with more from the meeting and board papers.
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