Quote:
Originally Posted by You Need a Thneed
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.
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I haven't gone through the math, and maybe you have, but did the other quarters of the ring road cost $1B each? Just taking a quick peek on wikipedia (fwiw) it looks like the others were far below that amount. Using $1B as a figure seems like that is inflated at least 25%, and is basically double what the NW section cost even after overruns.
There are plenty of examples of successful toll roads. Maybe the cost is more than $2. Maybe the entire Stoney trail is tolled and the amount is based on usage so that if you drive a certain distance on there you pay a corresponding fee. Perhaps this could be a half and half model where the band pays some, corporation pays some.
I think that the city/province should be knocking houses down in Lakeview should this not go through, so the toll isn't my first choice. I just think that the idea isn't exactly far-fetched.