Consider road use fee

THE EDITOR: With regular protests about poor roads and government’s diminished revenues, it may be time to consider a radical approach: privatise some roads in Trinidad and Tobago.

Roads are neither built nor maintained properly because government has no fiscal incentive to build good roads or keep same in good repair. Their only incentive is political, which means roads will only be fixed every three or five years and, even then, not according to need but according to what repairs confer the biggest return in terms of votes or party financing.

If, however, a stretch of road is owned by a private firm or individual, they will be motivated to keep the road in excellent condition in order to generate fees from drivers who use it.

The main objections to such a plan are standard. How do you stop some drivers from using the road for free; how do you ensure the road owner maintains the road; and how do you stop fees from being exorbitant? There are ways to deal with all these issues.

Toll booths and/or chip payment technology can ensure the road is only accessible to persons who pay. The real problem will be traffic bottlenecks at the points of payment, but there are logistical solutions to this and, in any case, the traffic should be no worse than what entails at present.

On the issue of the owner keeping the road in good repair, this problem is automatically solved in areas where there are two or more roads leading to various destinations. In Couva where I live, for example, many places can be accessed through backroads and if each of these roads were sold to a different owner, competition for traffic (fees) would ensure good maintenance.

In cases where no alternatives are available, however, the government or the regional corporation would have the authority to suspend fees if users complain about potholes or other problems until the owner fixes the damage.

As for fees, take Point Fortin as an example. The population in that borough is about 20,000 people. We take as a working assumption that this population is served by 3,000 vehicles who traverse the main road twice a day. If that main road were leased to a private company who charged each vehicle 50 cents a trip, this would result in revenues of $90,000 a month or over $1 million annually, with drivers paying $30 a month.

Is this too high a fee for a good main road? And wouldn’t that profit for maintaining five miles of road be worth the investment for a company? This model can be applied to many, if not all, areas of T&T. Since all our present road networks are less than satisfactory to all drivers, surely this is an approach worth considering. Other benefits would follow, such as car pooling and fewer trips, hence less traffic.

ELTON SINGH, Couva