Government Commissioned Report Rejects Tolling |
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In 1997 the Interdepartmental Group commissioned a report from a Dublin based consultancy firm to “analyse the possibilities for Public Private Partnership (PPP) in Ireland”. It was on the basis of this report that the Department of Finance set up a specific PPP unit and decided to implement PPP pilot projects. These projects are mainly road projects. Under the scheme private finance pays for the construction of parts of the proposed new motorway network and recovers its investment by levying a toll on the finished road. The Waterford and Fermoy bypasses are examples of such projects. But the report, delivered to the Government in July 1998 rejected the idea of tolling parts of the inter-urban network. Tolls would lead to users choosing a non-tolled route, thus traffic would be diverted away from the newly constructed toll roads and onto the existing road network. “Even low-level tolls may not be appropriate unless all competing roads are tolled. Otherwise, traffic will be diverted from the tolled facility to other facilities with a loss of efficiency for the road network as a whole”1 . The only circumstance where tolling was deemed to make both economic and transport policy sense was in the case of congested routes. By charging users for access to heavily congested roads the overall efficiency of the road network could be improved. The only existing road that would be suitable for tolling is the M50. This is due to it’s “high traffic volumes . . . and the potential of tolling as a traffic management tool” 2 |
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Public Private Partnerships, Farrel Grant Sparks, July
1998, p49 2 ibid, p 50 |