The Consumers’ Foundation yesterday raised questions about a government decision to add another Electronic Toll Collection (ETC) lane at the Taishan (泰山) toll station on the Sun Yat-sen Freeway (National Freeway No. 1) despite the relatively small number of car owners who have installed the ETC on-board units.
At the beginning of 2008, 530,000 automobiles were equipped with the on-board units, which was about 8 percent of the market.
LOW ETC USE
As of January, 940,000 automobiles had the units installed, which is still only 14 percent of the market, the foundation said.
The watchdog group said that as a result of having a total of three ETC lanes in each direction of the Sun Yat-sen Freeway, non-ETC tollbooths would each on average need to collect tolls from more than 34,000 vehicles each day, which is equal to three times as many as the ETC tollbooths.
Despite the low rate of ETC useage among car owners, the National Freeway Bureau’s recent decision to set up a third ETC tollbooth in each direction of the Sun Yat-sen Freeway was disproportional, Consumers’ Foundation secretary-general Hwang Yu-sheng (黃鈺生) said.
The foundation also cited data that showed that during peak traffic hours, 5,795 vehicles without ETC units pass through the tollbooths each hour. This means that the five non-ETC lanes must each collect tolls from 1,159 vehicles per hour.
TRAFFIC JAMS
Taking into consideration that it takes an average of 3.4 seconds to collect a toll fee from each vehicle, it would take more than an hour for the vehicles to pass through the booths, causing heavy traffic congestion during peak hours, the foundation said.
The foundation said the heavy traffic caused for non-ETC motorists was the government’s way of unreasonably forcing drivers to install the ETC units in order to avoid spending long periods of time waiting to pass through the tollbooths. It urged officials to reconsider its toll plan.
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