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ATA fears toll of WestConnex sale

Selling Sydney motorway will drive cost of truckies' tolls even higher, says Australian Trucking Association

 

Selling Sydney’s controversial WestConnex underground motorway will drive the cost of trucking tolls up even further in the long run, the Australian Trucking Association (ATA) has warned.

ATA chair Geoff Crouch says that truck drivers in New South Wales are already struggling to pay the tolls they are charged – and the proposed sale could send costs even higher.

“Motorists have the ability to hop on the train or catch the bus if they wish to avoid toll roads, but a freight transporter can’t strap their load to the back of a bicycle and hope for the best,” he says.

Crouch made the comments in support of the ATA’s submission to an Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, which last month flagged concerns about the planned sale of the WestConnex project to Sydney Transport Partners (STP), a consortium led by Transurban.  


 Related Story: The ACCC called for submissions into the proposal back in May. Click here to find out more


Transurban already controls 15 out of 19 toll road concessions in Australia, including seven of the nine in New South Wales – which ACCC chairman Rod Sims said at the time gave it “significant incumbency advantages” when looking for new acquisitions.

“We are concerned that the proposed acquisition may cement Transurban’s advantages when competing for future toll roads,” Sims said at the time.

The ATA and Crouch say the concern is a legitimate one, noting the NSW government’s tolling principles require truck tolls to be three times higher than truck tolls – a discrepancy Crouch said was not justified.

“For a fully laden, six-axle articulated truck, the estimated marginal cost of road wear on an urban toll road is 16 cents per kilometre. On the M7, for example, the truck toll of $1.19 per kilometre is more than seven times the actual cost,” Crouch says.

A sale would give Transurban an increased ability to secure new toll road concessions based on increasing the heavy vehicle multiplier on its existing toll road assets, the ATA says.

Any increases to the multiplier in Sydney that cane from the sale would ultimately flow through to other states, the ATA argued in its submission.

“Transurban have shown that their preferred approach to unsolicited proposals for new toll road concessions is to partly fund them by an increase in the heavy vehicle multiplier elsewhere on the local Transurban network,” the submission says.

“The proposed acquisition of WestConnex by STP would increase Transurban’s ability to do this for future unsolicited proposals in Sydney.”

A final decision from the ACCC into the STP’s proposed acquisition of the project is scheduled for June 19, with the Commission currently considering the submissions it received after an appeal for public input into the proposal.

 

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