DRIVERS may soon have to pay to use one of the region's busiest through routes if plans to extend a controversial congestion charging scheme in a North-East city are approved.

Durham County Council is considering the possibility of introducing charges in Milburngate, in Durham City, which has the county's busiest roundabout, to discourage motorists who are passing through the city to other destinations.

The council stresses that the charge is only a possible option and that the scheme would depend on the construction of a northern relief road, costing more than £14m, running from the A690 in the east to Aykley Heads in the north, to take traffic not headed for the city centre.

Two years ago, the city became the first in the country to introduce a modern toll road when it started levying a £2 charge for traffic using the narrow, dead-end road to the cathedral and castle.

It has been hailed a success in reducing unnecessary traffic and making the area safer for pedestrians.

The council has also introduced on-street parking charges to reduce congestion and plans to cut it further by opening three park-and-ride sites later this year.

It has submitted a bid to the Government's transport innovation fund for the relief road and toll.

But its highways manager, Roger Elphick, stressed the scheme could take eight to ten years to come to fruition and depended on the relief road being built.

"We want to encourage through traffic to use that relief road. One idea may be, and I say may be, to look at some form of extension of the road charging scheme.

"It is a really busy road. There are more than 40,000 vehicles that go over Milburngate each day. A lot of them have business in the town centre, but not that many."

Mr Elphick said details of the scheme had not yet been worked out and some form of satellite technology could be used to monitor and bill drivers rather than have a pay point that vehicles had to stop at.

Colin Wilkes, of the Durham Markets Company and the Durham City Forum, said traders were already worried that many people in the region had the erroneous impression that people had to pay to get into Durham when the existing charge only applied to one road.

He said: "It would be awkward to have another toll at the city's doorstep. We wouldn't be rushing to support that unless there were obvious benefits.

"Durham can be rightly proud of its many assets, but I don't think we would want to be known as toll city."

Roger Cornwell, chairman of the City of Durham Trust, said he feared a new toll road could drive people to shop elsewhere.

He said the council should wait and see what impact the park-and-ride schemes had before considering toll charges.