By MINAMI ENDO/ Staff Writer
December 3, 2020 at 19:19 JST
KOBE--For whom does the road toll? Not late-night drivers, apparently.
So many vehicles have skirted the tolls for the Harbor Highway over the past five years that it rung up an eye-popping tab of about 1.35 billion yen ($12.9 million), according to Kobe city officials.
But it was not exactly difficult for them. Since some of the toll booths are left unattended overnight, that lets drivers sail right through without paying. There are no toll gates, either, according to city officials.
The highway has two sections, east and west sides, and tolls are collected in the middle on the Maya ramp.
Road tolls are 110 yen for one section and 210 yen for two sections.
But since the Maya ramp’s toll booths are unattended by staff between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m., users are supposed to put cash into designated toll boxes on the honor system. They currently cannot receive change in the process.
Equipment that counts how many cars pass through the Maya ramp registered about 2.16 million overnight for fiscal 2019, city officials said.
The city was supposed to collect about 237.6 million yen in tolls, but, in reality, took in 521,000 yen, or 0.2 percent.
Records from April 2015 to October 2020 show all those free rides took a toll on the budget, with more than 1.3 billion yen uncollected in total.
Construction of the 10.5-kilometer Harbor Highway, which runs through local coastal areas, finished in 1993, but it has not always had this problem. It used to have the opposite.
According to city officials, staff were assigned to work the toll booths overnight in fiscal 1998 and 1999.
But since nighttime traffic is very low, that produced an annual deficit of around 20 million yen.
Officials decided to leave the toll booths unattended overnight starting in fiscal 2000 to save on costs.
The city estimates annual staffing costs would reach about 58.8 million yen if it assigns workers to the toll booths overnight, leading officials to continue to opt against it.
“If we strengthen the toll collection, the number of passing cars might decrease, potentially producing a deficit again,” an official said.
The city government has been working on setting up an electronic toll-collection system. But the new system has been delayed due to technical problems stemming from how the ETC toll booths are positioned.
The city is scheduled to begin construction of the new system in fiscal 2020 and put the system into operation sometime within fiscal 2022. The overall construction tab is pegged at about 2 billion yen.
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