Bridge tolls will not increase council confirms
THERE are no plans to increase tolls on the Mersey Gateway and Silver Jubilee bridges, despite a hike for the Mersey tunnels recently being approved, Halton Council has confirmed.
But a transport expert has warned it could have an impact on traffic travelling through the borough.
The Liverpool City Region Combined Authority (CA) recently agreed its new annual budget which included a 20p rise in the cost of travelling through the Birkenhead and Wallasey tunnels, driving the price up for a car from £1.80 to £2 per journey.
But a spokeswoman for Halton Council confirmed it will not be following suit, with the tolls expected to stay at £1.80 for registered users who have a sticker, and £2 for unregistered, for at least the next year. Currently anyone living outside Halton has to pay the tolls, with Halton residents being eligible for a local user discount scheme.
A Halton Council spokeswoman, said: “I can confirm that there’s no increase in the bridge tolls for the next year.
“This has been confirmed by the
Secretary of State for Transport. It’s the fifth year in a row that there has been no increase.”
In the council’s original plans for charging on the bridges published in 2011, it stated its intention that the initial tolls should be ‘roughly the same’ as the Mersey tunnels.
But traffic modelling expert Dr Dave Milne from the University of Leeds’s Institute for Transport Studies, said increasing one set of tolls and not the others could have repercussions.
He said: “The main point to make is that if tolls change then I definitely would expect that to have some impact on traffic levels. However, the scale of the effect would depend on quite a few things, in particular the scale of change in tolls, the detailed pattern of journeys crossing the river and the alternative options available to people whose journeys become more expensive.”
The CA has said there will be a tunnel discount for people who live in the Liverpool City Region and use the Fast Tag or T-Flow prepayment systems. It said the increase would help to ‘balance the books’ due to a fall in traffic during the pandemic.