Quote:
Originally Posted by Slava
Well they could get private company to build it, maintain it, collect the tolls and send them a cheque each year. They don't need to have the cash up front (assuming this is legal under the Indian Act). I'm in favour of toll roads in general, but if the SW portion is tolled, the rest of it better be as well. Lets throw the airport tunnel in for good measure!
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Let's do some math here. Let's say that the reserve gets a private company to build, finance, and maintain the road and the road is built to the exact plans that the province came up with.
There's some complicated interchanges, so let's say the project costs $1 Billion.
Looking at the 2011 Calgary traffic volumes, the highest volume of traffic on NW Stoney is 50,000 vehicles per day, so let's use that.
It's not a long stretch of road, so you probably wouldn't get away with charging more than $2 or so to use the road, so I'm going to use that.
Assuming no interest for the time being, it would take 500 million vehicle trips to pay off the road, and at 50,000 vehicles per day, that takes 10,000 days to pay off the road - more than 27 years. But traffic volumes are lower on weekends, so you don't average 50,000 vehicles per day over all 365 days of the year.
Now let's assume interest must be paid, and let's say that they get a really good rate of 2%. To pay off $1 billion over 30 years at 2% interest requires a monthly payment of about $3.7 million.
That would require 1.85 million cars to drive every month with a $2 toll - an average of about 62,000 per day everyday.
I think it's a little bit questionable whether you could pay off the road in 30 years. Do they get financing with no money down and money payable over a longer term than 30 years?
All that assumes that people will still drive the road as much even if it has a toll, which probably isn't quite true. It's not like there couldn't be alternatives, and if even a little bit a of traffic leaves the existing roads for Stoney Trail, that probably helps those existing roads flow much smoother.
The reserve would also have to get the provincial government to build the rest of the road that would lead to their road, or else the whole thing would be pointless.