I hate toll roads

I hate the very idea of toll roads. It's visceral. It may even be irrational. Whether it is or not, I still hate it.

Thought experiment: Here we have a road. It's a perfectly good road. It may even take you where you want to go. Lovely. You might walk down it. You might ride your bicycle.

But.

You can't use it unless you pay to go there. Pedestrians and bicycles almost certainly aren't allowed. To prevent non-paying users, there are fences along the side of toll roads - maybe even walls. I've seen both.

If you don't want to pay or can't pay you'll have to go some other way. The people who want you to pay for roads will have a financial interest in making the other - tax-funded - way more difficult to use. There is no financial incentive for them to do otherwise. They will run down the maintenance to "save money". The public roads are degraded so the private roads might prosper....and profit at your expense.

Looking around at failed "PPP" (public private partnerships) roading projects in places like Canada and Australia, the case for obstructing the tax-funded roads would be even stronger, as failure of the pay road must not be allowed. Usually, the taxpayer underwrites these PPPs - to protect against failure by the private partner - while the private participant expends huge effort to shove costs onto the public partner through loopholes in the contract. Big bucks are eaten up by accountants and lawyers arguing over compliance and fulfullment. This is how it has too often gone elsewhere.

National's Maurice Williamson championed toll roads with multi-million dollar gantries of electronic sensing equipment to allow money to extracted from toll road users, based on their reg plates or a transponder installed on the vehicles of frequent users. He's at it again as the election approaches.

To me, it's just one more sign that this really is the same old 90's National Party....still pushing the same user-pays barrows to generate ticket-clipping profits for the small clique of transport (and other) cronies who back them......all the while claiming it's for our own good. People without memories lap it up. The market theory is so pretty. The reality of actual practice forgotten or unknown.

If we are constrained for roading infrastructure, the cheapest way to fix that is the invest in public transport. But, as we have seen in the power industry, there are no profits in conservation. Profits are largest when consumption is highest - however wasteful that may be overall. Never mind we could avoid spending billions on power plants if we use existing technologies to save power instead of generating more.

The same applies to roading. We have loads of roads. But we use them unwisely.

In the Herald article, Transport Minister, Annette King, lists roughly $7 billion worth of roading projects in Auckland alone. A good chuck of that would not need to be spent at all if there was better public transport. The new tunnels under the Waitemata Harbour won't alter much, but the volume of traffic carried through them and their capacity into the future could be greatly enhanced by better public transport - rail and road.

The people pushing toll roads aren't entrepreneurs or investors. They are would-be monopolists looking for the golden ticket. The NZ Herald quotes Willliamson as saying we will all be paying $50 / week to use the toll roads and be happier for it. I doubt it.

Combined with better public transit, I very much prefer tax-funded roads to roading-for-profit. Tax-funded roads are, effectively, funded by public roading insurance supported by the widest possible base: everyone who drives a car or truck. Any of us can go on any road we have collectively paid for. We own them all and can use them all.

Rational or not, that's how I feel. I won't pay to use a road on a per-use basis. Roading is public infrastructure. If we want more roads, we should stump up more tax.

While I might condone paying a toll for a defined period to recover the cost of construction of a public road, I won't vote for anyone who says I should pay a toll in perpetuity to use a road owned by one of their cronies.