26. 10. 2009
The project for a toll that would be paid by drivers coming to Prague’s center and which should have already started has once again been postponed.
Now it seems that drivers will not pay for entering the city center before 2015.
A pilot phase of the Prague toll should have been started, if everything was going on schedule. Prague City Hall has Kč 100 million (€3.8 million) set aside for starting the project in its budget for 2009. However, everything was stopped. According to City Hall authorities there are two main reasons for postponing it. “The first reason is that it is nonsensical to introduce the toll before we finish building of the inner and the outer ring roads of Prague.
The second reason is that Parliament must make some changes in legislation that will allow Prague to collect the toll,” CityHall spokesman JiříWolf told CBW.
Also DeputyMayor Rudolf Blažek (Civic Democrat, ODS) says that it is too soon to introduce the toll system.
“We can start to work on the systemof tolls in three or four years. It is not possible for the time being as it is not allowed by the current legislation. Besides, the whole project will be very expensive, so it is not a matter for the current agenda,” Blažek told daily Hospodářské noviny (HN).
City Hall has already paid Kč 30 million for a study conducted by consultancy Deloitte CzechRepublic. Deloitte offered three ways of collecting the toll—through toll gates that are used at highways, through a satellite systemor through a camera system. Prague has chosen the camera system that is used, for example, in London and Stockholm.
Time is money
Around Prague’s city center there should be 125 cameras that would record car’s registration tags and compare them with a database of those cars whose owners would pay the toll. Deloitte recommended that the toll should be double of the price of the Prague mass transportation ticket, which means it would currently be around Kč 50. City Hall wants the drivers to pay more and suggests Kč 120. “With this maximum variant, the preliminary estimate of the costs of introducing the toll is approximately Kč 640 million and the operation costs in the first year would be roughly Kč 430 million,” Wolf told HN.
The price of introducing the toll system is becoming increasingly expensive. In 2005 students of the Faculty of Transportation Services of the Czech Technical University in Prague (ČVUT) worked out a project called Externalities in Transport, in which they assumed that the costs of introducing the systemwould reach Kč 500 million, the yearly operation costs would be Kč 100million–150 million.
According to Zdeněk Říha, head of the Institute of Economics andManagement of Transport and Telecommunications of the Faculty of Transportation, the most widely known is the systemwhich is used in London. This system was introduced in 2003 and works with the aid of technology called automatic number plate recognition (ANPR). “According to a study conducted by [governmental transport planning agency] Transport for London during two years of this system being in operation, the intensity of car transportation has decreased. Another positive effect is an increasing of the city revenues. Collected money must be reinvested to the London transport system, concretely into mass transportation,” Říha stated.
What are they waiting for?
Prague also needs to reduce the transport in the city center, which is overburdened in the long term. There are two projects that should solve this problem: the inner and the outer city ring roads, which should be finished in several years, and the toll system. City Councilwoman Petra Kolínská (Green, SZ) claims that the whole project was stopped by City Hall authorities for unknown reasons.
“They only informed us that the project was stopped, but did not tell us why. I think that one reason is the price of the system, the second is the problem of legislation and the third is that City Hall is afraid to introduce a controversial systemthat would completely change life in the city,” Kolínská said.
Kolínská said that CityHall authorities should not wait and suggested a change of the Law of Road Transport to the Parliament that would enable Prague to collect the toll. “We support this system in the long term, however, now we do not have enough time and capacity to force the councilor responsible for transportation to do it,” Kolínská admitted.
CityHall spokesmanWold said that the authorities are prepared to suggest such a change of the law to Parliament, but they will do it when the Czech Republic has a new government. As the parliamentary elections are going to be held inMay 2010 at the earliest, the change of the law can be discussed in the Parliament no sooner than summer.
Some people also warn that there is another condition for introducing the toll system in Prague—the city has to build other Park and Ride (P&R) lots so that people can leave their cars in the parking lots and travel to the city center by the metro, a bus or a tram. “There is not enough of [the P&R lots] in Prague. Many people who come to the city have to leave their cars in some underground parking lots that are absurdly expensive. People have to pay Kč 50 [€2] for one hour, while in many western cities they pay only €1. They do not want to pay so much and instead they go to the city center in a car and then the center is just overcrowded,” Karel Stránský, a Prague taxi driver, told CBW.
Autor: Tomáš Piňos
Zdroj: Czech Bussiness Weekly 26.10.2009