NSW has the highest road taxes in Australia, plus that iniquitous fuel levy that was imposed in 1995 and supposed to have been abolished one year later but was not. Despite the cost of car registration, driver licences and literally every other expense levied by the NSW government that is grossly higher than in any other state, the roads are appalling.
What is worse is that even with the huge cash flow from taxes and charges connected with driving, the NSW government is incapable of funding decent freeways. It has resorted to contracting the building of such roads to private consortiums, which operate them as toll roads. In some cases, the government has actually turned over to those contractors parts of roads that were already built and paid for by NSW taxpayers, who now have to pay tolls to drive on those roads that they previously owned.
Not only that, the NSW government has embarked on a policy of trying to force motorists to use tollways instead of free roads, by adopting some despicable strategies, to the detriment of taxpaying drivers. Some through roads have been blocked to force motorists to either use expensive tollways or drive a lot further than they did before those roads were blocked. Roads have been narrowed to increase congestion, so as to make motorists drive on tollways, rather than be stuck in traffic on those narrower roads. Exclusive bus lanes have been established to cut down the number of available lanes to motorists. In all, the NSW government, in collusion with toll road consortiums, has been acting against the interests of drivers.
Despite the efforts of the NSW government to force motorists to use toll roads, many drivers are deliberately avoiding them. In Sydney, the Cross-City Tunnel (CCT) is an excellent example of how people power can cripple such iniquitous schemes. The shortness of the CCT, coupled with the large toll, ensured that most motorists would avoid it at all costs. Literally one year after the CCT was opened, it went broke because of lack of patronage. The Lane Cove Tunnel (LCT) is in peril because despite the deliberate narrowing of Epping Road to try to funnel motorists into the LLC, many preferred to tolerate the slower trip through Lane Cove up to the Gore Hill Expressway to avoid the high toll.
NSW motorists need to fight back against the disgusting road policies of the state government. Short of kicking those fools out of office and electing politicians with the interests of NSW residents at heart, motorists can use the power of the boycott very effectively. The CCT has already felt the brunt of angry motorists that refuse to use it and it is now bankrupt. The LCT hopefully will go the same way. Then the NSW government may be forced to take those toll roads back from the consortiums and turn them into freeways, as they should have been in the first place.
AVOID TOLL ROADS AT ALL TIMES - Just be proactive and ensure that you allow enough time for you to use free roads to get to your destination at the same time as if you had driven on a toll road. In many cases, the difference is only a few minutes.
According to GPS mapping by WhereIs, the trip from Beecroft in the northwest of Sydney to Sydney International Airport takes approximately 30 minutes using the M2 Motorway, Lane Cove Tunnel, Sydney Harbour Bridge and Eastern Distributor. The tolls for the return trip as of 01 December 2008 amount to a whopping $22.10.
To do the same trip avoiding the tollways takes 40 minutes each way. So for an extra 10 minutes each way, you can save $22.10. This is serious money, especially if you make this trip frequently. If you have to make this return trip every weekday, avoiding the toll roads will save you over $110 per week or a whopping $5000 per year. Under the congestion toll increase for the Sydney Harbour crossing, if you drive south across the Bridge or Tunnel in peak hours, you can add another dollar to each trip, which is another $250 per year on your bill.
Another example is a trip from Beecroft to the start of the M5 Freeway at Prestons. The time difference between using the M2 and M7 tollways and avoiding them is negligible. Driving on those tollways takes 40 minutes and the distance is around 50km. The return trip costs a massive $21.76.
To do the same trip avoiding those tollways takes 44 minutes each way and the distance is around 35km. So for an extra 4 minutes each way, you can save nearly $22 for the return trip. This is apart from the extra 15km in distance and the saving in fuel, which more than makes up for the almost unnoticeable extra time spent by avoiding those toll roads. If you have to make this return trip every weekday, just like the trip to the airport, avoiding these toll roads will save you around $5000 per year.
Many motorists drive from the Castle Hill area to the west of Sydney via the M4 Freeway and back. To use the M7 Tollway, the return trip costs $10.84 and the distance is 32km each way. The driving time is around 28 minutes each way.
However, to make the same return trip by avoiding the M7 Tollway and driving along Old Northern Road, Cumberland Highway and the M4 Freeway via Wentworthville costs nothing in tolls. The distance is 29km and the time taken each way is 29 minutes, only one minute longer than using the M7 route. Is it worth forking out nearly $11 to save two minutes for the return trip? Nobody in their right ming would agree with that.
A typical everyday work trip for many people is from the northwestern suburbs of Sydney to the Sydney CBD. Using the M2 Tollway, Lane Cove Tunnel and the Sydney Harbour Bridge inbound takes around 35 minutes without traffic delays and costs $10.67. The return trip from Sydney CBD to Dural via the same route using the Sydney Harbour Bridge (no toll northbound), the Lane Cove Tunnel and the M2 Tollway costs $7.67, making the return trip each time a total of $18.34 per day or a massive $91.70 per week.
A typical CBD worker from Dural, Glenhaven or Cherrybrook who had to take a car to work every day for 48 weeks per year and used the tollways would pay around $4400 per year. But if that same person avoided the tollways, for a few extra minutes spent on non-tolled roads each day, he would save that $4400 per year. For a tradesman earning $35,000 per year, this would equate to a 12% rise in pay.
But the most disgusting piece of highway robbery of them all has to be what is euphemistically called the Falcon Street Gateway in North Sydney. There are two tolled ramps - one northbound heading onto the Warringah Freeway at Falcon Street and Military Road, Neutral Bay and the other southbound heading from the Warringah Freeway onto Military Road. These are nothing more than 100 metre exits onto Falcon Street, yet motorists incur tolls just to get off free roads onto other free roads.
The best way to completely boycott this gigantic rip-off is for southbound drivers to merely exit the Gore Hill Freeway at the Pacific Highway exit and drive down to Falcon Street. Northbound drivers can use the RTA operated non-tolled northbound ramp heading from the harbour crossing and North Sydney onto Falcon Street, denying these rapacious highway robbers the revenue from access ramps that should be free.
There are some great tools you can use to make it easy to navigate to avoid toll roads:
TELL YOUR FRIENDS - Let your motorist friends know of your experiences and how you manage to save a lot of money and lose very little time by avoiding toll roads and hopefully they will do the same. Promote the idea wherever you go and it is surprising how such things catch on.
I have a friend who travels between his home and his two business premises on the other side of Melbourne five days per week. He was paying around $70 per week in tolls, which was over $3300 per year. He didn't even spend that amount on fuel and servicing his car. On a visit to Melbourne in 2008, I plotted out his route on my GPS receiver, firstly via toll roads and then by avoiding toll roads. It turned out that if he drove every day avoiding those toll roads, he would only add about 5 to 10 minutes to his trip each way.
He immediately bought a GPS receiver and now avoids those toll roads like the plague. Sacrificing a few minutes each way every day is saving him a lot of money. This has literally been the equivalent of him getting a $70 increase in income every week. My friend has told me that he doesn't even notice the negligible extra time it takes him to drive to work and back. In any event, during rush hours, the tollways are so congested and slow, that there is literally no time saved by using them and the hapless motorist still pays a lot of money for being stuck in traffic moving at a snail's pace.
I have been using GPS for a long time - TomTom Navigator loaded onto my PDA smartphone - for the same purpose. Not only does it save me the effort of trying to navigate my way to venues the hard way by using a street directory and warning me of those dreadful speed and red-light cameras, but I use the AVOID TOLL ROADS option at all times. I have found that by doing this, I might increase my driving time fractionally, almost unnoticeably in fact, but the monetary savings are enormous over the period of a year.
On average, I estimate that I save a whopping $1500 to $2500 per year by avoiding toll roads and I would rather have that money in MY pocket than in the pockets of tollroad operators. Interestingly enough, on some occasions, a route avoiding toll roads is actually quicker than driving on those costly routes.
I don't care about spending 10 minutes extra in the car each way going to and from Sydney Airport if I save over $22 each time. I don't care about spending 4 minutes extra each way going to the start of the M5 Freeway past Liverpool and back if I save myself over $20 each time. I ALWAYS boycott toll roads unless it is completely unavoidable, such as the occasional Sydney Harbour crossing and it pays off handsomely. All I know is that I refuse to fork out $40 to $80 per week to drive on toll roads when I can avoid it. I want that money in my pocket, not in the clutches of toll road operators and the NSW government.
This is an extract from my RTA E-Toll statement for three months from July 2009. Note that there is not one toll charge on it, yet in that three-month period in my work as a club entertainer, I would have covered up to 10,000km and on most days, travelled to many places where I could have used toll roads. However, I avoided them completely, still got to my gigs in plenty of time and I estimate that by completely avoiding those toll roads, I saved at least $500 in that quarter - that's $2000 savings in a year, a substantial sum in anybody's language. And by using my method, any motorist can do it.
The idea of forcing motorists to submit to electronic tolling instead of paying cash at toll booths is not mainly to save money and time. It is to stop motorists realising what it is costing them to use those toll roads. For instance, if a motorist drove from Pennant Hills to Sydney Airport and had to dip in his pocket at the M2 Tollway, the Lane Cove Tunnel, the Sydney Harbour Tunnel and then on the way back, fork out cash at the Eastern Distributor, Lane Cove Tunnel and the M2 Tollway, he would realise that this return trip just cost him in excess of $23. If that motorist made that trip fairly often, he would realise that he was getting fleeced and would find an alternative route to avoid paying those tolls.
Electronic tolling breeds complacency. A motorist being pinged by the electronic highway robber doesn't notice, because he's not reaching into his pocket for that money, so he drives blithely on and only gets upset when he gets that quarterly toll statement and sees something like a whopping $500 extracted from his credit card. Then, social engineering kicks in and the motorist forgets about the fact that he's just been cleaned out of a large sum of money that he could have avoided paying.
I have analysed my own expenses and travel for the 2009 to 2010 financial year and only when I crunch the numbers, do I appreciate how toll roads could have robbed me. For instance, just my fuel bill cost me $2230 - a pretty decent sum of money, but I do drive a fair bit to my gigs. If I would have used toll roads in that period of time, I estimate that in that financial year, it would have cost me around $3000. It's a bit hard to really work it out exactly because I avoid them, but from where I live, there is the M2, M7, Lane Cove Tunnel and some of those other highway robbers like the Falcon Street ramp that I avoid.
However, the tolls would have cost me a lot more than my fuel, which is crazy. If I had paid $3000 in tolls and $2230 in fuel, my expense for the year would have been $5230 - in a 48 week working year, that's a whopping $109 per week. But by avoiding toll roads, I just paid petrol money - $46 per week. What a difference that is - paying $46 per week instead of $109 per week for the privilege of getting stuck on a mobile parking lot, as a lot of those tollways are during rush hour.
Most motorists don't do the number-crunching exercise, so they are getting ripped off by toll roads and don't realise it. Sit down one day, add up what you have spent in fuel over 12 months, then drag out your toll accounts and add up what you blew in toll fees. For the average motorist in Sydney, the result may be a nasty shock. Some people don't mind paying to drive on those toll roads, but as far as I am concerned, if an expense can be avoided, then it's worth avoiding it. Toll roads are easy to avoid and the amount of money saved is not just a few dollars - it's usually more than what you spend on fuel.
Of course sometimes it is very difficult to avoid toll roads such as the Sydney Harbour Bridge and Tunnel for people who live in the Northern Beaches areas and need to go to Sydney Airport or suburbs south of the Parramatta River. However, it has been shown that a boycott of the CCT and LCT does work and people power can send these toll roads broke, to the point where with luck, they will be eventually resumed by the government and turned into freeways.
But you have to do your part to achieve this. It is not hard and it just requires conscious effort, especially with the assistance of a GPS receiver to make it easy. Tell your friends to boycott toll roads where possible and eventually motorists may get these roads back in the way that they should have been in the first place - as freeways.