Australian Federal Minister for Major Project, the Hon Paul Fletcher, made a speech on 3 April about infrastructure spending (full speech is here). Although the main point was that large infrastructure projects need to improve productivity for them to be worthwhile public investments, he also discussed road pricing. The speech as a whole is worth reading for anyone interested in the modern day challenges of funding and managing transport infrastructure (it cuts across road, rail and airports), but I am focusing here on road pricing.
The key point is that road pricing is supported over the long term, and that it requires community acceptance and understanding, which itself means demonstrating that there are net benefits in moving towards road pricing. He wants the Federal Government to work with the states in developing answers to key issues, such as rate setting, but also minimum standards of service (this can be both in terms of maintaining infrastructure but also congestion levels) and what is called "community service obligations". In Australia, this term is used in other sectors to mean provision of a basic service at a common price across the whole geography of the country, regardless of the cost of provision and typically includes postal services and the basic landline telephony service among others. Clearly in Australia one issue is very long lightly trafficked roads that, if the users were charged the full costs to recover the fixed costs of those roads, they would simply not use them (and the consequences at the communities and properties they access would be abandoned).
The Minister indicates that road pricing for heavy vehicles is a "logical first step" and the Heavy Vehicle Road Reform programme is the current process for progressing that. Certainly I agree, although the experience of private vehicle pilots in the US may well be helpful in the long process of incorporating light vehicles in due course. The line between commercial vehicles and private vehicles is a big one to cross in terms of public acceptability.
The segment from the Minister's speech on road pricing is reproduced below in full, the footnotes are links to specific reports and sources:
