Does anyone else think that we pay excessive prices for our toll roads? Within the last few months, I have had to renew both my driver’s licence and car registration, which comes to well over a grand combined. I’m sure many of you are in a similar situation, so you can probably understand my feeling that it’s a little excessive having to pay an extra fee to drive on certain roads. Of course, I am talking about the dreaded toll roads.
Here in Logan, we have the Logan motorway, which costs up to $3.76 if you wish to grace its tarmac with your vehicle’s presence. All in all, that doesn’t sound too bad, unless you are using it to commute to work every day. If that is the case, you would be paying $1,880 in tolls every year — enough to buy quite a few tanks of fuel, even in this economy! And God forbid that you should dare to take the toll route without having a Linkt tag in your car! This happened to me earlier this year in a second-hand car I had purchased, and I received quite an unpleasant surprise in the mail a few weeks later. As soon as I espied the Linkt logo in my letterbox, I realised what had happened and expected that I would be asked to make a $2.19 payment. But upon opening it, I saw that Linkt doesn’t do things by halves. They had kindly added a $0.62 “video matching fee”, as well as a hefty $10.81 “administration fee”, for a total of $13.62! That is an incredible 500% markup on the original two dollar toll price!
Now if that isn’t bad enough, the costs go through the roof as you head into Brisbane city. It’s over six bucks to cross the river on the Gateway Bridge. Or if you prefer to take the Clem Jones Tunnel and Airportlink M7 to get to the Brisbane airport, that will set you back almost $14 — that’s more than half an hour’s pay at the minimum wage. Even the Go Between Bridge in South Brisbane costs $4.22 to cross. When you consider that this section of toll road is only 300 m long, that works out to a price of $14 per kilometre — making it the world’s most expensive toll road per kilometre travelled! And the actual bridge itself is only 117 metres long, which would make it an incredible $36 per kilometre to cross the Brisbane River!
Do you think it’s time to get rid of toll roads, or do they provide more convenient travel routes which we wouldn’t otherwise have? Surely these costs could be incorporated into vehicle registration fees?
— The Editor
Image credit: State Records NSW via Wikipedia CC2.0.
