The road to a sustainable future Henry Byrne Group Executive, Victoria and Strategy
The collective response to COVID-19 has been allconsuming, with governments, organisations and individuals forced to adapt quickly to our now, not-so new reality. As an owner and operator of toll roads in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane we’ve been monitoring the impacts of COVID-19 on transport and mobility trends since August 2020, and the challenges and opportunities that may emerge post-pandemic. One of the challenges facing Australia before the pandemic was our reliance on an unfair and outdated road funding model, which is explored in our most recent industry report, Urban Mobility Trends: Road Funding Reform. Like many countries around the world, Australia’s road funding model is built on the collection of fuel excise – charged here at 43.3 cents per litre of petrol and diesel.
Fuel excise - the single largest source of road-related revenue collected by the government - has been declining in real terms for decades due the increasing fuel efficiency of our national fleet. Motorists driving older, less economical vehicles are paying the most. As the world moves to decarbonise its transport systems by encouraging the adoption of zero and low-emissions vehicles, the system will become more inequitable and result in a bigger funding gap between revenue collected and that needed to build and maintain infrastructure. Despite low numbers of zero and low-emissions vehicles in Australia, a survey of 3,000 people across Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland commissioned by Transurban found that 42 per cent of respondents would like their next car to be an electric vehicle, with 84 per cent motivated by both the environmental benefits, and reduced operating costs. It’s important to stress that electric vehicles are not the problem. They are vital to the decarbonisation of our transport networks, the urgency of which was driven home in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report, which warned of increasing extreme weather. However, the more electric vehicles on our roads, the less fuel excise collected.
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