Project BRUCE/future of road tolling discussion

marno21

https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2023/0112/1346372-transport-project-considers-charges-for-road-network/

Given that the 10c increase in road tolls planned in November had to be scrapped due to the cost of living crisis, I fail to see how this is in any way viable.

munchkin_utd

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120101842#Comment_120101842

I find irish motor tax to be quite low, and compared to what it used to cost in Ireland 10+ years ago, the current system is a bargain (ye may thank the greens for that!).

Of course you need numbers for that, so heres someone who did the hard work and taking a ford mondeo as an example, you pay €156 motor tax in Ireland compared to 1623 in netherlands, 1080 in Denmark, 623 in Austria, and most other western countries are more than Ireland.

https://upcommons.upc.edu/bitstream/handle/2117/18150/vehicles.pdf

The toll roads in Ireland are also not the worst as most motorways are still free. If you drive across France or Italy you REALLY pay proper tolls, about 10c per km

KrisW1001

Yes, lots of Irish people still only ever look at the UK, which has some of the lowest motoring taxes in Europe (and, it has to be said, some of the biggest whingers about road taxes in Europe... the way they go on about the pittance they pay is pretty annoying). We are not a “high tax” country when it comes to cars: we’re about mid-table. (Insurance, on the other hand...)

But while tolls here on average are low, they are not evenly distributed. Take three journeys, all ending at the Red Cow interchange: the toll charges for a car that used M8, M7 to travel from Cork (235 km) come to €3.70, which is expensive by European standards. However, a car using M7 from Limerick (186 km) pays a European-average total of €1.90, but one taking M9, M7 from Waterford (148 km) will costs nothing at all in tolls.

The posted story is definitely something TII is looking at - it’s been on their radar for about three years now. One of the most likely first options is to move the M50 to a Road-Use Pricing (RUP) model rather than a single-point toll. This basically involves setting up multiple “soft” tolling points (camera-based) along each segment of the motorway, and then charging the driver based on how much of the road they actually used. Anyone using the current Liffey bridge will end up paying a lot less, but there will be a lot of complaint from the majority of people using M50 who do not cross the toll-point and so have been getting a free ride up to now.

Also under consideration are discounts for off-peak use and/or travelling with at least one passenger on board. The latter idea (HOV discount) has worked well in the USA, but has never been tried in Europe.

Cookiemunster

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120101924#Comment_120101924

I've no idea how they're working out their figures, but all emission based motor tax band rates end with 0. And the list of prices is very easy to find. But you are correct it's very cheap. A new Mondeo would be €210. Pre 2022 it would have been €280. However in Ireland we pay VRT on new vehicle purchases, which isn't paid elsewhere in the EU.

munchkin_utd

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120102055#Comment_120102055

maybe some countries literally have no motor tax and are happy get tax off fuel.

Going slighty off topic but every country has a different tax mix, and Ireland uses VRT (and a high VAT rate too) as a sortof stealth tax to enable lower PRSI and income taxes which get people voted in at election time.

If a politican said they would raise income taxes - which is the fairest tax of all as the richer you are the more you pay, but lower VRT and VAT, there'd be a mutiny, and probably the most aggressive negativity from parties representing lower income people who would benefit the most from taxing income rather than expenditure.

hans aus dtschl

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120101842#Comment_120101842

Road tax is back? When did this start?

OK I apologise to all for being snarky: there's some very constructive posts above mine.

magicbastarder

i'm usually in two minds about tolling motorways specifically; granted, i get the idea is probably to pay for their construction, but we're well past that now.

as a carrot/stick approach though, surely there's an argument to be made that if anything, it's motorways which shouldn't be tolled? as in we want people to use them? take for example, the M50; if we tolled it over the entire length, many people would bail off onto surrounding roads, and that would be unwelcome. my own use patterns would facilitate that - most of the time i use the M50, i enter at one junction and exit at the next one, so if i was being tolled for it, it'd just be an incentive for me to use the R and L road alternatives.

Wanderer78

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120101842#Comment_120101842

...oh dont worry, taxes are going up, period, this will continue to occur during this government, and the next, and the next, and the next......

AugustusMinimus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120101842#Comment_120101842

A very lazy post which doesn’t at all reflect the reality of the situation as proven by figures supplied by other posters.

I find it’s this kind of posts which dominate social media and lead to a completely false narrative being popularised.

McGrath5

Like some posters said above, in terms of overall tax, Irish motorists don't fair to bad.

I can see motorways having a pay per KM used type model. A user pays model is the fairest way to go, which is not how things are at the moment.

KrisW1001

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120102377#Comment_120102377

Un-tolled motorways with tolled side routes would be madness: people would end up diverting onto the motorway even for journeys that would be better taken on surrounding roads, just to avoid a toll. I think the problem with your argument is that in reality, “we”, or rather the people who manage all this stuff, actually don’t want people to use motorways: they want people to use the most efficient means of transport for their journey - that can be a motorway, but it can also be a local road, or for that matter a train, bus or bike. Road User Charging is a kind of “nudge” to encourage drivers to avoid travel habits that cause traffic congestion.

And speaking of bad habits, your usage pattern on M50 is actually the worst in terms of creating congestion: traffic joining and leaving in quick succession is the most disruptive to the overall flow on the road, so if lots of one-hop drivers were discouraged from using the motorway, the traffic would actually flow much better.

Road User Charging would discourage this by charging, say, €0.50 for the first segment used, then €0.10 per segment after. (by “segment” I mean the stretch of road between two junctions). That way, it only makes sense to use the road if you’ll be travelling on it for a fair amount of its length. This would shift the operation of M50 back to what it was originally supposed to be - a bypass of Dublin city centre - rather than just a handy short-cut for commuters who are actually going in or out of the city.

As for getting cars out of city streets, well: Congestion Charging is another kind of Road User Charge, but now instead of paying to use a length of road, you are paying to enter a particular area. I’m not a fan of Congestion Charging in cities unless there’s also a method to give exemptions or heavy discounts to residents.

magicbastarder

And speaking of bad habits, your usage pattern on M50 is actually the worst in terms of creating congestion: traffic joining and leaving in quick succession is the most disruptive to the overall flow on the road, so if lots of one-hop drivers were discouraged from using the motorway, the traffic would actually flow much better.

i can see the logic there, but as i stay in the auxiliary lane, i suspect the effect would be much less than if i was to join, and enter lane 1, to go one exit further.

i go from junction 4 on the M50 (ballymun) to junction 2 on the N2 (near the ward). it's the most efficient route in terms of time and fuel economy (but is approx 1km longer, so i don't know how that balances out)

Cookiemunster

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120106550#Comment_120106550

No such thing as road tax.

AugustusMinimus

No such thing as Road Tax as others have said which completely nullifies whatever your argument is.

AugustusMinimus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120106550#Comment_120106550

I didn’t insult you or indeed say anything about you. I criticised your post, not you.

breezy1985

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120102377#Comment_120102377

I think the toll on the tunnel in Limerick is a bit of a joke. It's the only way to cross the Shannon without going through the town so use should be encouraged

roadmaster

In 10 years Northlink will come back under TII and they will have full control of the M1/N1 you will probably see in about 5 years construction starting on over head gantrys on all exits of the motorway between the airport and border with automatic tolling on the distance traveled once the northlink section is under Full TII control

gooseman12

I think this is probably part of an overall look at taxation in general regarding motoring.

If you look at the model right now we pay motor tax to just keep the car on the road and we pay excise on fuel. In a sense the excise on fuel could be seen as a toll on km driven, its a usage based tax. I saw someone mentioned a pay as go tax above, and in its simplest sense, we already do pay as we go with the excise on fuel. The issue for the future being that this usage based tax is going to go away as more and more vehicles become electric.

The government have to balance the books so from their point of view, if they are losing one usage based tax then one of the possible options is to introduce another usage based tax, ie a toll on distance driven on the road. I can't see how they could add this tax to electricity as it is used for many many other things besides charging a car so they are looking at tolls as the next best option.

That's my take anyway, its a straight swap from one usage tax to another.

SeanW

Actually yes, there is a thing called road tax and Irelands implementation of it is called Motor Tax. In the UK it's called Vehicle Excise Duty and there are similar schemes around the world with different names but similar function.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_tax#Ireland

Anyone claiming that Irish motorists do not pay road tax is not telling the truth.

AugustusMinimus

Ah Wikipedia. The great arbiter of the unwashed masses.

KrisW1001

Not quite. The “I pay road tax” complainers are under the impression that “road tax” is a tax that pays for the roads and their maintenance. This is not true. Motor Tax is a tax on motor vehicles and it goes directly into government revenues. There is no correlation between the amount of motor tax collected and the amount of money spent on roads.

For a long time the roads budget has exceeded the amount of revenues from motor tax. In 2021, €907 million was collected from motor tax, but the 2022 budget (funded by those receipts) had €1370 million allocated to roads.

magicbastarder

The fact that the tax is levied on people owning motorised vehicles is a subtle hint, no?

AugustusMinimus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120123447#Comment_120123447

I can also walk and cycle down the road without paying any “road tax”.

magicbastarder

if i want to walk my dog on a public footpath, i am legally required to own a dog licence. i will petition the minister to rename it from 'dog licence' to 'footpath licence'.

Aontachtoir

Lads, I think most of us know what “road tax” is for. Can we drop the “ACTUALLY it’s called motor tax not road tax and even though you have to pay it to take your car on the road it doesn’t directly fund road maintenance” song and dance which goes on every time it’s brought up?

I would be interested in the possibility of a per-km charge for all roads in the state. As in, at the NCT (or another inspection for this purpose) your mileage would be checked and your road tax would then be based on the number of km driven since the last check. The driver would be able to decide how often they want inspections if they don’t get annual NCTs. I wonder if that could be made work.

It’s going to be interesting to see what replaces fuel excise, which as noted above was in many ways a pretty good usage-based tax for road users.

KrisW1001

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120123447#Comment_120123447

No, it’s not. The government taxes all sorts of things: house purchases, alcohol, home heating oil, tobacco and insurance policies, and the money from those gets used for things that don’t have anything to do with the source of revenue. Taxation of motor cars is just another one of those.

If the argument is that this is a tax to pay for roads, consider that commercial vehicles pay less of it than private motorists do, even though commercial vehicles are more responsible for wear and tear on the road network: they drive higher mileage and are normally heavier than passenger cars.

magicbastarder

no it's not subtle, or it's not a hint?

your answer seems to be agreeing with my point. which is that it's a tax on motors, not roads.

magicbastarder

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120123862#Comment_120123862

your mileage would be checked and your road tax would then be based on the number of km driven since the last check

multiplied by the weight of your vehicle.

KrisW1001

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120123898#Comment_120123898

Your post was too subtle for my half-attentive reading :) Yeah, I agree with your point, sorry for the confusion!

My preferred replacement for motor tax would be a weight-based annual charge - unlike CO2 emissions, it’s easy to check, and hard to cheat. Yes, EVs are penalised by this as they’re usually about 30% heavier than an equivalent ICE car, but then EV owners don’t pay fuel duty, so it balances out (for what it’s worth, I drive an EV).

Per kilometre pricing is something that I think should be limited to high-speed limited-access roads (i.e., motorways and those N-roads that are are motorways in all but name) but not 2+2s. Even then, it should only be considered where there is traffic congestion; putting a toll on the rural parts of M9 or M18 would just subject local villages to traffic pollution while the motorway goes unused.

veryangryman

I disagree with not making fun of people who still call it road tax.

You have to call out wrongness. It is to be discouraged.

AugustusMinimus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120123945#Comment_120123945

Indeed. It’s not called road tax and saying that road and motor tax are the same thing doesn’t make it true.

Aontachtoir

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120123945#Comment_120123945

I presume this is tongue-in-cheek, but you don’t have to call out anything, especially not common and universally-understood terms which are in widespread use.

Besides, it is very reasonable to view it as a tax on accessing the road in a motor vehicle rather than as a tax on a vehicle’s motor. If I own a field packed full of cars that never leave my private property and are not used on public roads, I do not have to pay tax on any of their motors.

hans aus dtschl

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120123862#Comment_120123862

The trouble is, when people scream "ROAD TAX" as a justification for trying to run you off the road, it becomes something of a sensitive point (particularly when you do pay motor tax and lots of other tax). This is what makes me knee-jerk respond to any mention of "road tax" in the predictable unhelpful way!

On the "per-km" charge, I agree with your mindset but I'm not sure whether what you're suggesting (per-km) will work. There's a few problems I can think of:

1. We want the tax to shape good behaviour, not just increase state funds. To that end some people simply need the vehicle more than others. Blue badge holders are obvious, but actually women do lots more "socially responsible" type trips, like dropping elderly relatives places, dropping kids places. So per-km charges sort of disproportionally affect women doing what might be "socially responsible" driving while benefitting businessmen doing a lazy work-and-back commutes. I've no idea how to resolve that issue at all. How do we tax lazy entitled people more efficiently?
2. Some people have very limited alternative transport options, particularly in the countryside. No amount of carrot or stick can give them alternatives to clocking up the km's day-to-day. At least in this instance, you could possibly make the "per-km" something of a "postcode" type tax with urban dwellers paying higher per-km charges. But what about urban dwellers who are working in countryside, for instance providing services or teaching in schools etc?

The only really fair way I can think of is the likes of congestion charges, where you get charged upon entry to or transit through an urban area with good public transport and P&R.

And maybe also a rule like the Japanese have, where you must declare exactly where you intend to park your car? This would go a long way to decluttering streets at the same time as creating a database of "where cars originate" and targeting those areas for improved sustainable transport. The census does this a bit already, and you can see for instance that in Cork, on one side of the Blackrock greenway lots of people walk and cycle to work/school, whereas on the other side almost nobody walks/cycles. It's already clear that one side needs more targeted schemes to get people out of cars.

AndrewJRenko

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120123905#Comment_120123905

If the tax is going to relate to the wear and tear caused by the vehicle, it needs to be multiplied by the fourth power of the weight of the vehicle. This is from the US, with imperial measures, but you'll grasp the relativities arising.

https://twitter.com/who_shot_jgr/status/1605301684644691969?s=20&t=7YMkoAYeit6tM5ZVZ7r03w

magicbastarder

depends on what the intent of the tax is. if you want it to discourage people buying land yachts, you don't have to use the fourth power relationship.

i'd love to have this conversation with my father in law, while also avoiding it like the plague. his (ICE) car has a stated kerb weight of between 2.2 and 2.4 tons. it's a minimum of 800kg heavier than mine; it'd be like getting 8 to 10 fully grown adults sitting on the roof of my car to get my car to weigh the same.

Aontachtoir

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120124201#Comment_120124201

Sure, we can use it to shape good behaviour, but what is good behaviour? It is entirely unclear to me why someone driving to the place they work to support their family and pay their taxes is automatically less socially responsible than someone driving their kids to school or nipping down to the supermarket for a litre of milk. The school run in particular is a crime and should be clamped down on at least as hard as commuting.

We don’t give people with limited transport options discounts on their fuel excise, so why would we give them discounts on its replacement? If you wanted, I suppose you could give someone a scaling number of tax-free kilometres every year based on the number of dependents, rural location, etc. Congestion charges are fine too and probably the easiest to implement, as long as we admit that these will punish people who do not have access to good public transport.

Overall though, any change which makes it harder or more expensive to drive will most heavily punish the people who are most reliant on cars today. The people pushing for these policies are responsible for this, and must own the negative impacts as well as the positives.

Lastly, and probably most importantly, that hole in the exchequer still needs to be filled.

hans aus dtschl

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120124368#Comment_120124368

I don't disagree. You're only making my point more clearly I think! It's difficult to define good behaviour as far as transport is concerned once emissions and congestion are taken off the table. Right now "less emissions" is good behaviour. And obviously "not killing and injuring vulnerable road users" is a given. But per-km charges doesn't really get at enforcing good behaviour. It's just a blanket penalty. And maybe that's actually OK if you just need to fill government pockets.

For what it's worth and to answer your question directly, the reason someone driving to their place of work is less socially responsible than someone driving their children to school is because single-occupancy multi-seat vehicles are a poor use of constrained resources (fuel, wear on the road, space on the road, storage space, etc). Again, in a sparsely populated area that's not a big deal but in an urban area it's wasteful and we know that we should aspire to better. Of course it would also be great to get the school runs out of cars, and the short distance school runs particularly, but it happens that they're marginally less wasteful than single-occupancy cars doing short distance commutes, and their end purpose (education of schoolchildren) CAN be more socially responsible than some jobs. I work for large wealthy corporations, for instance, and I would say someone bringing their kids to school by car is probably more socially responsible than me driving myself to work over the same distance.

hans aus dtschl

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120124367#Comment_120124367

Yes and that's what I'm getting at with my "socially responsible behaviour" spiel. The ideal would be that people only use what they need, but right now as far as transport is concerned we kind of fetishise or encourage wasteful behaviour: vehicles that weigh more, burn more fuel, take up more space etc.

Maybe we should tax by vehicle size and weight and their measured occupancy rates in future?

KrisW1001

Size and weight is sufficient, I think, if you’re just replacing the flat annual motor tax, but weight tends to follow footprint fairly closely, so I’d say weight alone would be just as useful.

The idea of “socially responsible” trips is something that is really difficult to determine, but my gut feeling is that these journeys would tend to be a lot shorter than typical commutes, and more importantly they would tend to happen outside of peak hours. I don’t believe they’d matter much to congestion relief, which is the main objective of Road User Charging.

But if congestion reduction is the goal, we do need to talk about school runs. You only have to drive any morning when schools are off to see the huge impact school-drops have on city traffic levels. Whatever about primary-school kids, I find it hard to believe that secondary-school children couldn’t manage to use a bus if one were provided.. especially in cities.

(Occupancy discounts would also encourage parents to drop their kids to school by car, as this would make their own journey into the city centre seem cheaper; As an extreme example, I know of a situation in another country where occupancy discounts encouraged a husband and wife who were going to different locations in a city take one kid in each car in order to save tolls on a stretch of road between their homes and the city centre)

As I said above, I don’t like the idea of per-kilometre charging on the general road network, and I do thing any forthcoming charging proposal will be on motorway-style roads (The proposal that I heard of a couple of years ago was to bring in per km charges on the whole length of M50). Limiting it to congested motorways would also remove the problem of penalising rural dwellers who require a car to get around.

Also, I would oppose the idea of needing a car parking space to own a car, as this penalises people who live in urban areas and must rely on on-street parking (or people in apartments who have only communal parking spaces). And besides, urban dwellers are not the primary cause of urban traffic, which mostly originates in suburbs and exurbs.

hans aus dtschl

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120125249#Comment_120125249

Agreed with all your points except the last paragraph: why should we accept on-street parking for the semi-permanent storage of people's private property? It's not guaranteed/reliable, which can result in all sorts of bad behaviour (parking on footpaths, double yellows etc). We could maybe mandate that such homeowners have a permit, which the local authority issues on a per-person (and costed!) basis, and prevents the over-saturation of residential on-street parking in any given area. Similar with apartment complexes: if 50 apartment owners own a car, and there are only 20 communal spaces, it's surely causing negative effects somewhere else nearby? I might be missing a trick here, but it seems to me that if you can't tell me where your car will be stored at night, that you're perhaps getting more than your fair share of the public realm?

The extreme example that comes to mind is the time one of my neighbours were keeping a horse in their transit van, parked a short way away from their house, and directly beside someone else's house!

KrisW1001

I lived in a city centre for nine years and almost never had to resort to parking illegally. Parking problems happened during the day when people came in to town...

Really, the answer is for more residents-only parking provision in cities. If you want people to live in cities, you need to allow them to have the same right to property as they would have elsewhere Most people living in cities won't actually need a car, but for those who do, there needs to be a place for them. And if you walk through the residential parts of the “model cities” like Amsterdam, you see lots of cars parked up.

I have been in this situation myself: I lived in the city centre, but my job meant I had to travel to a rural location regularly. What should I do? Move out of my home just because someone says “cars shouldn’t be in cities”? Most of the time I worked at home, so contributing nothing to traffic, except for those trips that I had to take every week, for which no viable public-transport alternative existed.

It was fine, and as I said, I never needed to park illegally; but one day, the city council decided to put your idea into practice and refused to renew my resident parking permit because I lived in an apartment (specifically an apartment: had I lived in a terraced house I could have continued to park on-street), which left me with a livelihood that needed a car, a car that I couldn’t legally park anymore, nowhere else to live at short notice, and an eight month fight to get things sorted out. (Now I think of it, they still didn’t refund about €200 of clamping fees though...)

The mistake was to plan apartments with inadequate parking provision, or not enforce the planning (In the case of my home at this time, the developers claimed in the planning that there was one space per two units, communally used; then they sold the spaces exclusively with certain apartments...)

Pete_Cavan

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120123916#Comment_120123916

If an additional tax/charge encouraged people to drive through villages instead of using the motorway, surely that would already be happening as you will have to pay for more fuel (and duty on same) if flying down the motorway. In reality, most people are willing to pay for the convenience and time saving of a motorway.

Toll booths are a bit different in that many people resent handing over additional money, particularly when they feel they have already paid through the multiple other charges/taxes. If a new motorway charge was invisible, with cameras at junctions reading number plates for example, I think people would quickly get over the initial outrage and would quickly be using the motorway without considering the charge. It would quickly fade into a normal part of life, particularly if everyone is driving EVs and therefore not regularly paying for fuel which is heavily taxed.

plodder

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120123862#Comment_120123862

I would be interested in the possibility of a per-km charge for all roads in the state. As in, at the NCT (or another inspection for this purpose) your mileage would be checked and your road tax would then be based on the number of km driven since the last check. The driver would be able to decide how often they want inspections if they don’t get annual NCTs. I wonder if that could be made work.

It’s going to be interesting to see what replaces fuel excise, which as noted above was in many ways a pretty good usage-based tax for road users.

Interesting idea. The only feasible (like for like) replacement for fuel excise has to be based on distance travelled. If car odometers were really tamper-proof, this would be a great solution, but the temptation to fake it would be enormous. Maybe if other countries decided to go the same way, the car industry could come up with some solution?

Stovepipe

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120102047#Comment_120102047

The fact that the tolling point is located way up on the Northern side of the M50 is the fault of the tolling company, so a huge numbers of users don't pay anything on it.

Stovepipe

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120101924#Comment_120101924

European car buyers pay considerably less money for new cars than we do and get a better specification. They also have the option to import cars from anywhere in the EU that we don't. They also have a bouyant second hand market and ours has been trashed!

KrisW1001

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120126476#Comment_120126476

It’s not the fault of the tolling company - the toll was originally, and is still, for the use of the very expensive twin bridges over the River Liffey just here (You can get a good idea of just how big that viaduct is here: Google Maps). It was officially called the West-Link Toll-bridge, as a counterpart to the “East Link” tolled crossing of the Liffey at Ringsend.

magicbastarder

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120126476#Comment_120126476

it's the bridge that is tolled, the crossing point between what is normally considered to divide the southside from the northside. i wouldn't say it's located 'way up on the northern side' by any meaningful definition.

screamer

We already get shafted in Ireland for everything car related from cost to purchase to fuel and car tax. We also have some of the worst public transport systems, which even if they exist in a lot of rural cases are not fit for purpose, running at odd times. It simply seems that life in Ireland is just becoming more of a drudge, tax the working person out of it, and I can see people just stop trying in short. Even company cars are now so expensive in bik they are being handed back in droves. I don’t know what the long term plans for this are, as if it’s to push everyone to live like rats in high rise urban apartments they better get building them.

Stovepipe

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120127781#Comment_120127781

The tolling point is between Jn 6 and 7, North of the bridges so ten junctions, including the biggest at the Red Cow are untolled and the majority of them are on the South side. So thousands of vehicles every day use the M50 and pay nothing. How is that efficient? I hate tolls as I regard them as yet another tax but I'll bet the operators would have point to point tolling if they thought they could put it in tomorrow.

JohnC.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120130261#Comment_120130261

The toll is for the bridge, not the motorway. How many people use the rest of the motorway is irrelevant to this specific toll.

Stovepipe

I know about the bridge BUT it is already proposed that the M50 and other motorways be tolled per section and the bridge will become irrelevant as a tolling point.