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Why you will pay to use major Nairobi, Mombasa highways
Principal Secretary for the State Department of Roads Joseph Mbugua. Tolls were introduced in the late 1980s and removed in the mid-1990s in favour of the road maintenance levy fund (RMLF), where motorists pay Sh25 per litre of petrol and diesel.
Motorists will start paying toll charges on Nairobi bypasses, Thika Road and an expanded Kiambu Road as the State seeks additional billions of shillings to build and maintain roads.
The charges will be introduced first on the four bypass roads in Nairobi and the two major highways linking the city to Central Kenya, before going national. Mombasa’s Dongo-Kundu bypass is also a target of toll charges whose introduction date is yet to be announced.
“Thika, Southern bypass Eastern bypass… all these will be critical for us. We can’t limit ourselves to only tolling newly constructed roads as one would say Thika Road is not as old as Mombasa Road,” Roads Principal Secretary Joseph Mbugua said on Thursday.
“Those roads, while financed differently from public-private partnerships (PPP), require maintenance which the financier cannot support. Today, we are using a lot of money to maintain Thika Road. We need to create resources to address road maintenance and improve some of the a uxiliary roads within the area.”
Tolls were introduced in the late 1980s and removed in the mid-1990s in favour of the road maintenance levy fund (RMLF), where motorists pay Sh25 per litre of petrol and diesel.
The levy and taxes have been deemed inadequate to plug the growing funding gap for road infrastructure, which is estimated at Sh1.29 trillion over the next five years, and maintenance of existing roads.
The toll charges will first apply to roads that carry huge volumes of cars.
The Nairobi bypass roads—Southern, Eastern, Northern and Western—have made it easier to cross the city and freed other roads from the city’s notorious traffic jams.
The tolling policy, which is currently under public review and input, is key at a moment when Kenya is seeking to use private money to build roads, power plants and dams, with the investors recouping their investments from user charges.
Tolling will be based on the cost for maintaining and rehabilitating roads network, willingness to pay (after a survey of motorists) and users’ benefits.
The construction costs, margins and maintenance costs will be factored into the toll charges for new roads built under PPP.
Reductions and discounts on tolls will be considered, including waivers for local vehicles making short local journeys and incentives for high occupancy private vehicles, frequent users and electric vehicles.
Vehicles will be placed into 12 categories, from motorcycles to rickshaws and passenger cars and heavy and articulated trucks.
The Rironi-Mau Summit Road and the Nairobi-Mombasa Expressway are in the pipeline of roads built under PPPs, with tolls central to their operations.
Besides roads built under PPP, newly constructed roads using taxpayer money, revamped highways and multi-lane roads like Thika Highway are targeted with tolls.
The cost of the tolling infrastructure and operations will be capped at 15 percent of expected revenues, with those in breach exempted from user charges.
The tolling of major highways will ultimately be national in the push for fairness and equity.
“We need to have an aspect of fairness. Like you have had somebody say, why should someone from Rift Valley pay tolls when those going to Northeastern through Nyeri and elsewhere don’t pay?” posed Mr Mbugua.
The Ministry of Roads and Transport has backed tolling to boost resources for road construction and maintenance in an economic setting when the government has little room for borrowings following mounting debts, which is eating more than half of revenues.
“Tolling of roads is one of the ways to accumulate the initial lump sum amount of the money needed to develop, improve or rehabilitate road infrastructure quickly and get into services expeditiously,” the ministry states in the draft tolling policy.
“The reality is that loans and grants extended to the government have to be spread across various sectors of the economy, making it difficult to channel sufficient funds to get a single, major highway project developed and opened in three or four years.”
An estimated Sh1.3 trillion is needed for road construction and maintenance in the next five years against the available Sh65.37 billion. About Sh3 trillion is required for the next 10-year period.
The road maintenance levy, which was introduced in 1993 for the revamp of roads, is inadequate for the upgrades. The increased use of fuel-efficient cars and the entry of electric vehicles have emerged as a risk for the levy.
“It is now a global trend that people are moving to EVs, which will affect some of our fuel levy collections and therefore, we have to do a policy on electric vehicles to raise revenue for road maintenance,” said Mr Mbugua.
The levy collections stand at about Sh132 billion annually against a maintenance budget of Sh253.5 billion, says the policy document.
The Ministry of Transport has mulled another increase in the road maintenance levy, months after last year’s increment from Sh18 a litre of petrol and diesel to Sh25, which sparked a public uproar.
The introduction of taxes on motor vehicle insurance premiums has also been considered as alternative financing for roads
