Millions lost in M50 tolls as cars from 38 countries flout the law

stoneill

https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/news/millions-lost-in-m50-tolls-as-cars-from-38-countries-flout-the-law-37118970.html


So according to this report 130,000 journeys a day are made on the M50
Lets just assume that they are all cars, just to make maths simple

130,000 * 365 = 47,450,000. nearly 50 million journeys?
And at a cost of 3.10 per journey - 147,095,000 - is this correct?

Where does this money go to?

markpb

Your maths assume that the same number of people use the M50 at the weekends but that's definitely not true. I'd hazard a guess that it's about 50% of the volume on Saturday and less on Sunday. TII publish traffic counts so you could find the exact numbers if you wanted. Also, some percentage of vehicles have video accounts which reduce the toll to €2.60 or tags which reduce it to €2.10. Trucks obviously swing it in the opposite direction though.

The M50 costs a lot of money to operate. Off the top of my head, people who are paid include the toll operators (€80m per year), the motorway operators, the motorway maintenance companies (including TII), the breakdown and recovery company and the energy supply company for the street lights (€0.75m a year). I think that NTR are paid €50m each year for the buy-out of the toll bridge That will continue till 2020.

L1011

The Turas contract is 200-400m over 11 years (so a lot less than 80m a year)

TII annual reports don't give proper breakdown of income/expenditure for each toll road etc and slightly annoyingly I found a document with some better details (some M50 figures, the income from the profit-share on the M1 and M4, payments to the M3 and N18 etc) a week or so ago and now I can't!