this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2024
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Looking at policy.nz's transport section, National wanted congestion charges but it was Act who wanted (privately owned) toll roads. If you click on the item under ACT around user-pays, you get:
I think you could reasonably assume this meant the private sector would plan, pay for, and build the roads. Not that the government would add tolls to a publicly owned road almost finished.
Your last sentence made me wonder, is there any example of the private sector wholly planning, building, and running a road in New Zealand ever? Or is it just one of those things that's so obvious that without the coercive power of legislation for road building, and massive subsidies from the state that roads are not in any way an economic proposition?
When I look at PPPs such as Transmission Gully it really seems more like a broken outsourcing model where the Government took on all the risk, paid for the whole thing and then was going to let the private company toll it to extract rent from it until that became unpalatable so instead they're just paying directly for the management of it.
Just the first steps of a private company to try to find a "profitable" route, and then buy or lease a right-of-way through undeveloped land seem entirely ludicrous. I suspect that the boondoggle of more and ever bigger roads in the late 20th, early 21st century may well be come to seem in a couple hundred years to be as daft as tulip mania.
I'm not aware of an NZ example of a private company doing the full thing, but in the wider text I took my quote from they talk about trying to follow a Singapore model.
The government has to be involved somewhere, firstly because they are the only ones that can take the land (and most projects would be unfeasible if they couldn't do that), and secondly because the roads need to connect up to the state owned roads. Plus I guess resource consent and approval type stuff.
Other than that, I don't see why a private company couldn't do it, if it was worth it economically. Which brings me to your point: is it worth it?
I would guess that it's very difficult to find a route that is valuable enough to users that they can charge a decent toll and people will pay it instead of going around, but also that has a high volume of traffic. Ultimately, we probably don't have many (or any) such routes because these would be the first place that the government owned roads are built.
What was that toll road north of Auckland with the big tunnel, one of the first ones? I wonder if there is data to show the cost of building it vs the revenue gained over the first 10 years or so.
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