When Sydney’s modern motorway network was born in the late 1980s, authorities had a choice about how the much-needed road upgrade would be funded: taxes or tolls.
With state budgets under perennial pressure, Coalition and Labor governments opted for tolls.
Professor Allan Fels has laid out plans for a major shake-up of Sydney’s patchwork of toll roads.Credit: Photo: Kate Geraghty
The user-pays principle, politically fashionable at the time, was deemed necessary to limit public borrowing and maintain a premium credit rating. Ever since, private finance has been used to construct and operate motorways under public-private partnerships (PPPs), which give long-term concessions to operators to collect tolls from road users. The first example was the Sydney Harbour Tunnel, which opened in 1992.
Sydney now stands out for its array of tolled roads; there are 13 in all, far more than any other Australian city. Professor David Hensher, a transport expert from Sydney University, once labelled the city a “great laboratory” for the study of tollways.
Over time, the use of PPPs has transformed road transport in Sydney and given it a world-class motorway network. It also allowed the state government to shift billions from its own balance sheet to the private sector.
But the long-overdue independent review of tolls by Professor Allan Fels and Dr David Cousins has exposed serious flaws in Sydney’s roads experiment.
In short, the way tolling works has become a needless drag on the city’s economy.
Fels and Cousins find that toll setting has been more focused on financial concerns than on the efficient management of the city’s roads.
The fundamental flaw in Sydney’s tolling strategy – and how we can do better
8
1
12.03.2024
When Sydney’s modern motorway network was born in the late 1980s, authorities had a choice about how the much-needed road upgrade would be funded: taxes or tolls.
With state budgets under perennial pressure, Coalition and Labor governments opted for tolls.
Professor Allan Fels has laid out plans for a major shake-up of Sydney’s patchwork of toll roads.Credit: Photo: Kate Geraghty
The user-pays........
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