By Mark Mardell BBC News political correspondent

But the senior minister was smiling as he told me: "There'll be people crashing into the barriers because they don't know they are there, huge jams because drivers are turning round rather than paying and it'll all end up with complete gridlock."

	:	In pictures
The view from the street during the first rush hour

His cheerful little list was a prediction of what will happen on day one of the London Mayor's congestion charges and he could look happy because presumably Londoners will blame Red Ken rather than our off pink and increasingly not very Green Labour Government.

But of course there are no barriers, just cameras placed strategically around the city taking pictures of number plates as vehicles enter the charge zone.

Congestion charging is just a bit too daring for the government, too offensive to millions of voters. But that doesn't mean they think it is actually a bad thing.

The government got transport wrong from the very beginning when Tony Blair told his cabinet that transport was not a priority, that it didn't matter very much.

The suspicion remains that Ken's charges are a stalking horse, something the government can deplore and then introduce in every city in the land

It's something of a mystery how the man who is meant to have some sort of spiritual hotline to the inner concerns of Middle England could have missed the fact that the saloon bar of the Dog and Duck is blue with stories of shivering on stations and overheating in jams.

But he did. And then he compounded the error by putting John Prescott in charge.

Followed by Stephen Byers. The failed chaotic state that was the department of transport then descended into civil war.

It was not a happy time.

Ditching the car keys

John may have two jags while Stephen Byers can't drive but they both started with the simple premise that too many of us drive and more of us should use public transport.

But whenever either of them proposed anything to force people out of their cars Downing Street blocked it.

So they fell back on the rather vain hope that by making the railways better they would tempt people to throw their car keys out of the window.

It is hoped the charge will raise �130 million a year

It probably wouldn't have worked.

But we'll never know because the railways got considerably worse. They couldn't cope with the real number of passengers travelling so meeting the government's inflated targets was simply daft.

Then along came Alistair Darling. Not for him a grandiose plan to cut pollution levels and make Britain a safer and more pleasant place to live.

His job isn't even to get the country moving again. No, he's there to stop the transport system being Labour's biggest electoral liability.

The strategy is to take lots of pain, bad headlines and ridicule now, and hope that it will pay dividends in a couple of years time.

So cutting back trains sounds silly, but the idea is you g