Can toll pay
for maintenance of
The Sunday Nation
Nairobi,
21 April 2013
It was reported in
the press last that there is a plan to introduce toll fees on the new
Thika highway. The proposed charges are
Sh1.20 per kilometre for passenger cars
and Sh1.79 for pick-ups and matatus. Buses will pay Sh2.39, medium
trucks Sh2.39 and large trucks Sh3.59.
The plan is to use the money collected
to offset the estimated Sh1.9 billion required to maintain the highway.
At first sight, that maintenance cost seems rather high. But when one
remembers that Sh31 billion was spent on the construction project the
figure becomes reasonable: it is about 16% of the total investment. To
put it into perspective, ask yourself how much you spend on your car.
The second issue is whether the toll
fees can raise the Sh1.9 billion. To find out, we need to estimate the
number of vehicles using the highway. A traffic survey carried out in
2006 revealed that Thika road is used by over 60,000 vehicles each day.
That comes to more than 21 million per year.
But good roads attract more cars and if
we allow a modest 10 per cent increment per year, we can expect that
today, the improved highway is carrying more than 115,000 vehicles per
day; that is about 40 million per year…you cannot cure traffic jams by
building bigger roads!
I further suspect that 80 per cent of
the vehicles on this highway are cars, 15 per cent are matatus; and 5
per cent are buses and truck (both medium and large). This makes 32
million cars per year; 6 million matatus; and 2 million buses and
trucks.
With these numbers, the next step is to
find out the money that each category can raise in a year. For that we
need the distance covered. It is 41km from the Globe Flyover to the
Thika Town Flyover (Exit number 17). But it would be unreasonable to
assume that all the vehicles will travel over the full length of the
road. We can, however assume that the average distance covered is about
two-thirds of the total, that is about 28km.
Now we are ready to crunch the numbers
into a calculator. 32 million cars covering 28km and paying Sh1.20 per
km will raise a total of Sh1.075 billion (32,000,000 x 28km x Sh1.20).
Similarly, the total cash raised by 6 million matatus will be Sh300
million and Sh170 million from buses and trucks. The total comes to
Sh1.545 billion.
This is not far off the Sh1.9 billion
mark. The shortfall could be from some errors in the assumptions made in
our calculation. But even if there is no mistake, the difference can
always be topped up from the Road Maintenance Fuel Levy funds.
We pay Sh9 per litre of fuel for road
maintenance and this is one the reasons why many motorists are objecting
the planned toll fees on
 |
 |