Phil
Pennington Reporter
A
national plan for introducing more tolls on roads and a
strategy for using more tolling powers are running two years
behind schedule.
This comes at a time when the
government has had to slow down on building significant
highways for lack of money.
Transport Agency Waka
Kotahi admits it has been held up by “internal capacity
constraints”.
The plan and strategy first due last
year will now not be out until the first half of next
year.
The “strategic tolling position” would cover how
the agency can deploy new tolling powers in legislation
currently before parliament.
This position would be
used “when considering new roads for tolling” and how that
fits with paying for roads as a whole, NZTA told RNZ this
week.
Transport Minister Chris Bishop last week revealed
a slowdown in when some of the highways would be built,
saying National’s commitments in 2023 were “very ambitious”
and circumstances had changed.
RNZ asked Bishop if his
revised timeline took into account the information gap from
not having done a tolling plan yet, but he did not
respond.
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“The minister doesn’t have anything to add
beyond NZTA’s statements to you.”
‘Large volume’ of
work
The national tolls plan had been due in 2025,
about the time the government began taking a new look at how
to pay for the billions of dollars needed for the Roads of
National Significance or RONS.
NZTA cited a logjam for
the hold-up.
“Work on the strategic network assessment
and the development of a national tolling plan was deferred
from 2025 to 2026, primarily due to internal capacity
constraints, resulting from the large volume of
project-based tolling work that has been required in the
past two years” then pushed out again to 2027, it
said.
Last year, it said it was doing tolling
assessments of a dozen or so RONS, including the Northland
corridor to Whangārei, Mill Road in west Auckland and
Tauriko West, near Tauranga.
Recently, it has worked
up proposals for – and the government has agreed to – tolls
on three new highways in the North Island – Ōtaki to north
of Levin, Penlink in north Auckland and the Takitimu North
Link from Tauranga to Te Puna.
Earlier, tolls were
agreed for the 7km O Mahurangi Penlink stretch between
Whangaparaoa Peninsula and State Highway One, north of
Auckland, not now due to be completed until 2029. At first
due in 2026, it has been delayed by slips and “challenging”
construction conditions atWēitiRiver Bridge, which
will also push out its $830m cost.
Only three highways
currently have tolls north of Auckland and around
Tauranga.
New powers to toll
The delayed plan
and strategy go hand-in-hand, and aim to give the new
legislation traction.
In 2024, the government said all
big new road projects must
look at tolling, and it needed law changes to allow more
ways and reasons to deploy tolls.
The Land Transport
(Revenue) Amendment Bill that passed its second reading
under urgency in June would enable “corridor tolling” for
the first time – where an existing (not a new) road can be
tolled, if its users benefit from the construction of a new
road in the same corridor.
Tolls can be politically
fraught. National cabinet minister and Kaipara ki Mahurangi
MP Chris Penk has posted online, telling voters he is
pushing for better infrastructure, while emphasising drivers
must retain
the choice of a free road near any new toll
road.
A report back on the bill by the select
committee recommended specifying that motorists must get at
least one of four benefits – saving time, higher safety,
reliability or resilience.
It recommended removing
“efficiency” as a benefit, saying that should be demonstrated
through the benefits users get.
The law change
would also expand what toll revenue can be used for, beyond
just for the new highway concerned, and its debt repayments
and operating costs. Tolls would be adjusted annually by the
rate of Consumers Price Index inflation.
Where the
toll goes
Another constraint on more use of tolls has
been the old camera technology. The transport agency has now
worked for years to overhaul it – RNZ is seeking more
details of where that is up to.
The new “strategic
tolling position” will operationalise 2024’s policy
statement around tolls, said the agency, “confirming how the
additional powers contained in the… bill would be
used”.
“Within this, NZTA is considering the role of
tolling in the broader transport system, such as its role in
relation to other funding and financing tools, or network
performance interventions.
The existing three tolls
roads have fees between $2.10-2.60 for a car and $5.20-5.60
for a truck.
The Northern Gateway Toll Road, north of
Auckland, had 8.6 million tolls paid on it in 2023-24,
generating enough revenue over time to pay back debt and
potentially move the toll by 2038.
At the Tauranga
Eastern Link Toll Road had 4.1 million trips that year and
might be toll free by 2037, and Takitimu Drive had five
million and might be toll free by 2031.
From every
$2.60 car toll, $1.46 goes towards debt repayment, 80c to
operating costs of the toll systems and 34c to
GST.
The plan is for the new tolls to pay
for the maintenance and operating cost of the road
itself.
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