Shouts from the desert

According to the Sydney Morning Herald today, cash payments for tolls are to be phased out on Sydney toll roads. Interestingly, just two weeks ago I was discussing these with my wife and pointed out to her the two worrying aspects of the increase in electronic toll collection. The first and most obvious is that electronic toll collection means that somebody has a record of where you have been within the city - at least every time you go through the tolls. This is a significant privacy issue, and one which would in itself be sufficient reason for somebody to object to electronic toll collection.

The second concern this raises is that if you are being billed through the E-Tag, it does not feel like you are paying anything the way it does if you have to fish around for some coins to pay the toll. That means that the government can get away with adding more and more tolls on our roads, because we won't feel like we are being made to pay more.

So two weeks ago I was saying "watch what happens - as E-Tag use increases, tolls will start popping up all over the place". Of course this has been happening over the years anyway - 20 years ago the only toll in Sydney was the Harbour Bridge toll, and that toll was a mere 20cents (one way) having been changed from 10cents each way to ease congestion for traffic moving out of the city. E-Tags will just mean this trend will accelerate so that we can see tolls on any bottleneck road - the Spit Bridge, Epping Road and Delhi Road come to mind as obvious candidates in Sydney's North.

This may seem far-fetched now, but if you have ever driven in Florida you will have seen this sort of outcome first hand.

And if there are more tolls being collected this way, the privacy implications become more significant. We should not be forced to sacrifice privacy for convenience.

That all makes the move to ban cash toll payments a major issue deserving of strong opposition.