Toll charges - Cash must be put back into roads

THERE is a sense of inevitability about Transport Minister Séamus Brennan's determination to impose toll charges on drivers using the planned motorways linking Dublin with the north, south and the west of the country.

Doubtless, the financial constraints on government will strengthen the arguments in favour of toll roads which operate successfully across the EU.

Like it or not and the political reality is that many people are still opposed to the concept it looks as if toll charges are just around the corner.

If the minister has his way, then pay-as-you-drive charges will be in operation inside two years, starting next spring with the country's first major toll road at the Drogheda bypass on the Dublin-Belfast route, followed by similar systems on both the Dublin to Galway route and the Dublin to Cork motorway.

In future, drivers will pay about €2.50 to bypass some of the country's most notorious bottlenecks at Kinnegad, Kildare town and Monasterevin.

Whatever the merit of paying to get from one side of the country to the other, few motorists relish the prospect of being charged to drive in their own locality.

As a shrewd politician, Mr Brennan should realise the importance of finding ways to ease the cost for local drivers, who would be frequent users.

Environmental problems can also be significant and it would be counter-productive to steamroll over genuine objections. Consensus will be important in gaining the support of local people.

Similarly, it would be hard to exaggerate the need to guarantee all revenues from toll roads funded exclusively by the State are ploughed back into other road projects.

It would sweeten the pill if motorists felt their money was, for instance, being spent on upgrading neglected roads, or building bypasses at Fermoy and Ennis, rather than vanishing in a morass of Exchequer funding.

It would also make sense to run a pre-paid electronic smart-card operation rather than toll booths, which invariably cause delays, defeating the objective of creating costly bypass systems.

In a significant policy departure, for the first time a major stretch of the southern motorway will be funded totally by taxpayers and not by the public-private partnerships currently operating on the northern and western route developments.

This initiative will be applauded by those who see the partnership route as diverting large amounts of money into major corporations, a political payback for generously supporting party fundraising machines in the past.

Judging by the financial success of Dublin's east and west bridge links, it should not be beyond the imagination of the administration to run an effective national toll system that could be transformed into a major source of badly needed funding to improve Ireland's tattered road network.