An expert panel of the transport ministry has recently worked out a draft plan for indefinitely extending the period for collecting tolls from expressway users.

The ministry is planning to rescind the current time limit of 2065 for collecting the fees to ensure that funding will continue for making large-scale repairs and replacements.

Expressways provide services of higher levels than do other roads.

An arrangement for ensuring that users of expressways will continue to pay for their upkeep well into the future would be more desirable than spending taxpayers’ money on their maintenance, because such a system would make it more obvious how the provided services are covered by user payments.

It has been assumed, however, that roads, which are indispensable for people’s livelihoods and economic activity, should, in principle, be available for anybody’s use free of charge. A decision to perpetuate expressway tolls for an indefinite period would amount to a historic about-face.

The government should candidly explain the reason for the policy change if it believes that waiving the expressway fees in the future would not be realistic.

The expressway policy of the postwar period has been subject to a patchwork of quick remedies because the priority was on rushing to build an expressway network.

Tolls were collected along the Meishin Expressway, which was opened partially in 1963, to repay the loans borrowed from the World Bank to cover the construction expenses, but the tolls were supposed to be waived when the repayment period was over.

That setup, however, was switched in 1972 to a fee-pooling system, which was about administering the proceeds and expenditures across all routes in an integrated manner to raise funds for building new expressways. The fees were assumed to expire only after 30 years.

A 1987 plan set a goal of building 14,000 kilometers of expressways, nearly double the previous target, which gave rise to a growing number of unprofitable routes. Officials thereupon worked out a new system that allowed taxpayers’ money to cover part of the construction expenses.

Some expressway sections were built entirely on taxpayers’ money and were opened and brought into service free of charge.

The period for collecting the fees, which had been extended in 2001 to a maximum of 50 years, was again prolonged in 2014 to 60 years, and the date of the expected fee waiver was thereby put off to 2065.

That is because the Chuo Expressway tunnel collapse accident of 2012 brought home to officials that more funding had to be allocated for large-scale repairs and replacements than initially envisaged.

The latest draft plan recommends that expense estimates be increased every time it turns out in the future that new repairs and replacements are required, and that no time limit be set for ending the collection of fees.

The document said, meanwhile, that there should be “more discussions” on whether tolls should continue to be collected or should instead be replaced by a system of funding with taxpayer’s money.

In fact, expressways could come to be deemed as “profitable assets” if the tolls were to be perpetuated, and expressway companies could thereby face a fixed asset tax, which could weigh heavily on their finances, officials said.

It is more desirable in Japan, where the population is shrinking, to keep the existing pieces of infrastructure in service for a longer period than to build new ones. The expressway system should also have a mechanism for ensuring that the expenses for extending its life span are paid by its users.

There should be discussions, of a sort that is open to the public, on why, if ever, a perpetuation of the fees is inevitable and, if they are ever going to be continued indefinitely, what sort of an institutional setup there should be.

Even if tolls will continue to be collected, however, that should not be allowed to justify plans for building new expressways, or widening existing ones, that have a low cost-effectiveness.

The image of an ideal expressway network should be finalized before changing the system into one that allows the cost of upkeep to be covered more fairly by different groups of payers, including of different generations.

And it goes without saying that expressway companies will remain under constant pressure for improving the efficiency of their management.

--The Asahi Shimbun, Aug. 5