The new, 27 mile long, M6 Toll Road, constructed at a cost of 900
million GBP to relieve the traffic on the M6 north of Birmingham has been
welcomed by many, but others have raised serious objections to having to pay
road tolls when they believe that the taxes they are already paying for using
the road should be channeled into making existing roads usable and better.
It is certainly true that motorists will not be forced to use the M6 Toll Road,
but the choice is likely to depend upon the ability to pay. A commuter regularly
using the toll road twice a day will have to find over 1,200 GBP year,
and many simply can't afford it.
The actual cost of the using the toll road has been rather disingenuously
presented to the public as being lower than it is, with drivers being told that
it is a 2 GBP charge per car. That is certainly true at its opening, and
will remain so until the first ten million vehicles have paid their dues, but
after that, car drives will face a 50% increase to 3 GBP per car. It's
not an increase; the charges are fixed, and are being discounted for the opening
period only.
Ten million vehicles may seem a lot, and this may, on the surface, look like a
generous concession, but in reality, it will amount to a reduced charge for
just six months if the road is successful and attracts 30% of the current M6
traffic. Just three months if it attracts 60% of the existing traffic which
is what it needs to do to get M6 traffic levels back to its designed capacity.
Assessing how the M6 Toll Road will fare is difficult to do, and it is likely
that there will be a see-sawing in usage figures in the early days of its
opening. Casual drivers are unlikely to balk at a small one-off payment, but
commuters will have to balance regular, long term, costs against savings they
may make in journey time.
If the M6 Toll Road is an astounding success, then the M6 will be empty, giving
no reason for commuters not to use the M6. If most commuters choose the M6,
then there is more incentive to pay the toll and avoid the queues.
Commuters will no doubt be comparing notes between themselves as to which is the
best road to take at various times in the day, and those who have Traffic Master
systems indicating what the flow rates are for each road will have a distinct
advantage when it comes to choosing which road to take when starting their
journey.
In a perfect world, one would perhaps expect to see the traffic split 50-50
between using the M6 and the M6 Toll Road, but that does not take into account
the ability of the two roads to carry the traffic loads. The M6 was designed for
just 72,000 vehicles a day but is carrying over 180,000. To get the M6 back to
even its design capacity requires a shift of nearly 110,000 vehicles per day to
the M6 Toll Road; 60% of the current M6 traffic.
An interesting aspect of all this is just what effect on traffic flow the
processing of over 100,000 toll payers will have. While the toll booths are
placed at the exits from the motorway, it is still conceivable that tail-backs
could form which will actually bring the main traffic flow to a standstill.
While regular, and commercial, users may choose to opt to using automated
'tags' for deferred payment, many more will stubbornly choose to pay in cash
for each journey. It matters not what gizmo's one has fitted to a car if you
can't get to your exit anyway; being able to speed through the toll gates is
only a distant vision when stationary and far from your exit point.
M6 Toll Road use of course affects not just the road users themselves, but
those who built the road and are looking to make their profit from the
users of it. If they can attract 100,000 road users a day, they will be
generating some 100 million GBP per year if they were all car users, and
undoubtedly much more as vans are charged 6 GBP and lorries are
charged 11 GBP.
The M6 Toll Road has cost some 900 million GBP to construct, much more than
its original estimates, but this would be repaid within a decade. True, it
does not take into account the cost of running and manning the road, but with
a concession of running the road commercially for over 50 years, Midland
Expressway Limited will be making a tidy profit from over 50 billion
GBP of income over that period - and that is without taking into account the
revenue from commercial vehicles or toll increases which will undoubtedly occur.
If road users do not move to the Toll Road in the droves expected then this
hoped for profit will be much harder to obtain, but never the less, it would
seem unlikely that it will lose money in the long term.
It is this 'profiteering' which many road users take objection to. Yes, they
can understand the commercial arguments for privately funded road building, and
the need to have the outlay repaid, however that does not mean that they
support the idea of Toll Roads in the first place.
For many it will appear that the M6 Toll Road has been built to serve those who
can afford to pay while the less well off are left to suffer on the existing
M6. If the M6 deteriorates, then it will be suspected by many that this is being
allowed to happen to force people into using the Toll Road. Some have even
suggested that it would not be inconceivable with such money at stake that the
Toll Road operators would go as far as paying drivers of heavy goods vehicles
to actually use the M6 in a poor manner to coerce people onto the Toll Road. Any
one who has seen two lorries driving side by side on a motorway for many miles
will no doubt already suspect that there is a conspiracy in place to make a car
driver's life hell as it is. If there appear to be many more traffic jamming
incidents on the M6 than there are on the M6 Toll Road then eyebrows will be
raised, and the finger of suspicion pointed.
While some may see the imposition of a 3 GBP toll as being pretty low, the
reality of that being some 1,200 GBP per year for most regular commuters
is a little harder to take or budget for.
Car drivers already pay a huge amount of tax as it is, through Vehicle
Licensing and a massive tax upon every litre of petrol or diesel, and some are
wondering where this money is going if not in improving the roads for those
who use them. Many see the M6 Toll as being a double-whammy of taxation.
At the end of the day, most will probably have to decide if its cheaper to pay
the toll than waste the same in petrol while jammed up on the M6. The cost of
journey time saved will also be a factor, but one which is incredibly hard to
quantify for a commuter; a delay is inconvenient but comes for free. And at
least, unlike the Severn Bridge tolls, drivers do have a reasonable, and free,
even if slower, alternative to hand.
Commercial users will have an easier time in justifying the payment of a
toll as, to them, time really is money, and a delay in travel can cause
knock-on consequences which really do hit companies in the pocket.
The irony is though, that the M6 Toll Road is likely to be more attractive to
commercial users
than car drivers, and it is well known that it is the commercial users who are
perceived as being those who cause the problems in traffic flow on a motorway.
As soon as a commercial vehicle is on the road a three lane motorway becomes
little more than a two lane dual carriage way. With commercial vehicles battling
to overtake each other with speed differentials of a mile an hour, then a
motorway can easily become about as free flowing as a country lane in fog.
It has already been suggested by some that more car drivers would choose to use
the M6 Toll Road if it were guaranteed to be free of slow moving commercial
traffic, but the Toll Road, if it is relatively free flowing, is more likely
to appeal to those very vehicles.
Perhaps this is the design, and four times as many cars than commercial
vehicles are needed to use the Toll Road to generate the same revenue, but it is
unlikely that removing all commercial vehicles from the M6 will reduce its
overall usage in any significant manner.
How the M6 Toll Road experiment will pan out, and match with predictions, both
good and bad, remains to be seen, but it can only be considered an experiment.
Even so, the outcome will undoubtedly affect the policy of road building within
the UK for many years to come. Those who wish to see more private roads built
will undoubtedly already be declaring the venture a considerable success, while
rubbing
their hands at the thoughts of massive profits with government backed assurances
and rescue plans removing commercial risk, but the views of the road using
public must also play its part in determining the future.
Should the M6 Toll Road relieve the frustrations of M6 users but fail to make
itself a profit then what do we do ? Congestion charging in London was meant to
plough money into the public transportation system, but has been so effective
in reducing the number of travellers into London that there is little revenue to
distribute. Speed cameras which have to be self-funding won't be if drivers do
what speed cameras are there to enforce.
The current political idealism that everything has to be self-funding is
patently flawed when it comes to benefiting society as a whole. That there
must be physical profit in every undertaking is a stumbling block which will
have to be overcome by many.
Perhaps some privately funded schemes will be a success, while others aren't,
but that gives no cause to nail one's own flag to any particular mast. We need
to implement schemes which are effective and beneficial, and how we fund them
is a secondary matter. How the M6 Toll Road fares will only become clear over
the passage of time, and it is the road users who will decide its ultimate
fate.
