Toll roads are good (and bad), but who should pay for them?

IN THE midst of the court case between the City of Cape Town and the SA National Roads Agency Limited, and with continuing opposition to e-tolling in Gauteng, Sanral now has an advert on TV with a celebrity saying she values the toll roads because they get her home safely at night.

The implication is that without tolls we would not have the roads, but there are plenty of other ways to fund national roads.

In the court case, Sanral is saying that the city wants the gain of better roads without the pain of paying.

But it’s not the municipal government that pays, it’s you and I.

The question of paying through tolls or taxes or development charges or fuel levies is simply a question of how the burden is distributed. The strength of a toll is also its weakness.

As a mechanism to limit the burden to the users of a particular section of road, and to finance that road directly, it doesn’t allow the cost to be shared across a wider section of the population. And whether you think that is good or bad depends entirely on your perspective.

The municipal government knows that relying on the fuel levy or general taxes means that the burden is shared right across the country, and so the fight against tolls on the national roads in the Western Cape is a fight about how much of our economic wealth in the province should go towards an asset of national significance.

It’s not hard to argue that national roads are economic arteries that support interprovincial and international trade, and that the burden should therefore be shared nationally.

But one can also argue that having drivers pay for what they use can be a powerful planning tool by influencing travel patterns. In fact, the municipal government itself uses a similar strategy in other contexts.

Increase the cost of parking, or reduce supply, to encourage the use of public transport. Or let traffic congestion grow, for the same reason.

Your choice of a particular mode of travel is not based only on monetary expenses, it’s also influenced by the time, stress, comfort and safety of travel. So government can – and does – work with these factors to manage how we use the transport system and reduce costs.

Our municipal government needs to do this because it is facing significant challenges in maintaining the city’s infrastructure, for a variety of reasons.

A small area of land generating property taxes in relation to the area requiring services, population growth driven by people with little or no income, standards that require expen- sive infrastructure, a physically expanding city, and others.

You might realise that the existing fuel levy is a form of payment related to the amount we travel – with the added bonus that it is a more efficient way to collect funds than a toll system – but as a planning tool its usefulness is limited.

Let’s reframe the tolling question. What if our goal was to reduce the overall cost of running the city? Not just the roads, but all infrastructure and services, including public transport.

And let’s also consider that most of us, whether we drive or ride or skateboard to work, would like to minimise our own costs too.

Then we would want a more compact city, because that brings all sorts of benefits to government and residents and businesses.

And if we draw a line in the sand to contain growth within a defined area, we could say to Sanral, “go ahead and toll outside that line if you must – we are doing our bit by creating a more sus- tainable city and making sure the poorer communities that can’t afford tolls are safely within the city, closer to work opportunities and served by good quality public transport”.

The tolls could effectively work together with other strategies to create a stronger city by reinforcing the urban edge. If, that is, the different spheres of government and Sanral were able to work together.

The reality is that Cape Town is bound with its hinterland in an economic city-region. And politics is not a friend of sound planning.

But let’s acknowledge that the tolling question is a lot more complex than the impact on particular communities or industries that find themselves victims of geographical circumstance.

With an honest and open assessment, we might find that there are many unexplored answers to the question of how to create a more equitable city.