Tom Hayes (Tipperary South, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy for the opportunity to address this issue and I apologise on behalf of the Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport, Deputy Leo Varadkar, for his absence.

The Minister has responsibility for overall policy and funding for the national roads programme. The implementation of individual national road projects is a matter for the National Roads Authority, NRA, under the Roads Acts 1993 to 2007, in conjunction with the local authorities concerned. Furthermore, the statutory powers to levy tolls on national roads, make toll by-laws and enter into toll agreements with private investors in respect of national roads are vested in the NRA under Part V of the Roads Act 1993, as amended by the Planning and Development Act 2000, and the Roads Act 2007. While toll rates vary in line with consumer prices, the base rates are built into the public private partnership financing arrangements which enabled the high quality motorway network to be built.

Completion of the major inter-urban motorway programme in recent years has greatly enhanced the freight industry's access to a high quality road network between key urban centres. Given the scale of the investment in our motorways, an issue of concern to the Minister is the number of heavy goods vehicles which divert on to regional and local roads to avoid tolls and drive through towns, villages and rural areas rather than use the custom built motorways. This practice has significant safety implications for other road users, residents and pedestrians and adds to the wear and tear of the legacy roads network. For this reason, earlier this year the Minister asked the National Roads Authority to examine the feasibility of lifting tolls for HGVs for one month on one or more motorways. He made clear at the time that the scope of the trial would be subject to consideration of the costs involved. He, therefore, asked the NRA to engage with all the toll companies to assess the costs associated with this initiative. Given the high costs associated with rolling out the scheme throughout the network, it was not possible to include all tolled roads in the scheme. Best practice for a short-term pilot such as this is to examine the efficacy of the scheme at a limited number of tolling points. The selection of the pilot tolls was made on the basis of analysis conducted by the NRA.

The Minister, through the trial involving a toll free month on certain routes, wants to ascertain if HGV fleet operators can be persuaded to make greater use of the motorways. He considers that this will provide a worthwhile opportunity to study traffic levels in detail and assess the implications. It will also give fleet operators an opportunity to evaluate the time and efficiency benefits of using the motorways in question. While all routes cannot be included in the trial, the findings arising from this month long survey will feed into general tolling policy.

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