Expressway tolls halved today
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Global Times, July 1, 2011
Tolls on the Capital Airport Expressway will be reduced starting on Friday, and a special group has been established to eradicate illegal toll charges in Beijing, in accordance with a new campaign.
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Vehicles pass the Beijing-Chengde Expressway tollgate on Thursday. |
A hotline operator with the road monitoring center of the Airport Expressway Development Company, which oversees the road, told the Global Times on Thursday that tolls will be reduced to 5 yuan (US$0.77) from 10 yuan (US$1.54) for vehicles headed to the airport starting this morning. The toll for the Airport South Road to Terminal 3 (T3) will still be 10 yuan. No charges will be issued for vehicles heading into the city, the operator said.
Five State-level departments, including the National Development and Reform Commission and the Ministry of Transport, jointly issued a notice on June 14 informing local governments that they must get rid of overcharges and illegal tollgates nationwide during a new yearlong campaign.
Local governments need to standardize toll charges, according to the notice, even though expressway operations in most cases have been transferred to private or State-owned companies.
Furthermore, the Regulation on the Administration of Toll Roads states that the toll period for an expressway that is paying off its loan should be no longer than 15 years after construction. However, the municipal government gave special permission for several expressways to continue charging tolls for a total of 30 years, including the Airport Expressway, according to a Beijing News report.
Beijing's 16 toll expressways collected 5.7 billion yuan (US$881.7 million) last year, and the gross profit margin for expressway tolls nationwide was over 50 percent, even higher than the real estate industry's below-40 percent margin, the Beijing News reported.
The Airport Expressway will lose about 50 million yuan (US$7.73 million) in income in the second half of this year due to the toll cuts, Tan Zhenhui, the chief financial officer of the Hong Kong-listed Beijing Enterprises Group Company Limited, the predominant shareholder in the expressway, said at a general meeting of shareholders on Tuesday, according to the Beijing News.
"It's good to cancel the tolls, but I worry what it might be like later, as the Airport Expressway is already sometimes very congested," commuter Fu Rong told the Global Times on Thursday.
The Beijing Municipal Commission of Transport and the Municipal Commission of Development and Reform could not be reached for comment.
China International Capital Corporation Limited issued a report in November 2010 saying that reducing tolls would bring problems to expressway construction by reducing banks' and investors' interest in funding such projects, the Beijing News reported.
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