WHY ARE TOLL FEES INCREASING AND NOT DECREASING?

WHY ARE TOLL FEES INCREASING AND NOT DECREASING?

I often catch myself wondering: why must we keep paying—and paying more—for roads and skyways that arguably should have been built decades ago, using our tax money?

In an ideal world, the government would have built the essential highways and overpasses long ago. But instead we ended up with privatized expressways, elevated skyways, and tollways — infrastructure financed, maintained, and controlled by private concessionaires. Now we are not just users; we are clients paying user fees on top of the taxes we have long paid.

And what’s more troubling: the toll fees keep rising year after year — seldom, if ever, going down.

🚧 Why Fees Go Up

Private operators point to legitimate-sounding reasons:

  • High construction costs. Building skyways, overpasses, and tollroads involves acquiring land, buying materials, hiring labor — massive upfront investments. They must recoup these costs somehow.

  • Maintenance and upgrades. Roads wear out. Pavements crack. Lighting and drainage require upkeep. Tunnels need ventilation. Safety systems must be maintained. All that costs money.

  • Inflation and rising input costs. Fuel, materials, wages — everything gets more expensive over time. Operators argue they need to hike tolls to match these rising costs.

  • Debt servicing and profit recovery. Most expressway projects are financed through long-term loans from banks or investors. Toll collections aren’t just for upkeep — they are to pay back debts and deliver returns to investors.

For example: the most recent adjustments approved by the Toll Regulatory Board (TRB) added ₱5 for cars, ₱13 for buses, and ₱15 for large trucks on some expressways. That was accepted because costs were claimed to have risen.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with cost recovery — as long as it’s transparent, justified, and eventually finite.

⚖️ Why Fees Almost Never Go Down

But that’s the problem: they almost never do. Because once a private company invests billions into infrastructure, their business model expects years — sometimes decades — of steady returns. Lowering tolls would upset that balance.

These contracts were drawn with upward-only adjustments in mind. Inflation, maintenance, debt service — all allowed increases. But there was little or no provision for decreasing tolls once loans were paid or maintenance costs stabilized.

In effect, we are locked into a rising toll treadmill. The people pay — in fuel costs, commuting fees, costs of goods, inflation — but the benefits of amortized infrastructure rarely translate into lower prices or better cost-of-living.

Is This Just?

Is it fair that ordinary commuters, farmers, small business owners, and transport operators carry the burden of infrastructure financing — while private firms extract profit under long-term concession deals?

We already pay taxes. Now, every time we travel, we pay again. That is effectively a second taxation on mobility.

And when tolls rise, it's not just commuters who suffer. Transport costs rise; goods delivered to markets become more expensive; inflation creeps up. Farmers and small traders get hit hardest.

Most painful: we accepted it long ago — as if paying tolls was inevitable.

What Should Be Done

We must start demanding transparency, accountability, and fairness from toll operators and regulators.

  • Re-negotiate concession agreements to include benefit-shares for public transport, discounts for essential goods delivery, or capped rates after loans are paid.

  • Allow downward adjustments when debt is amortized or when traffic volumes warrant economies of scale.

  • Introduce adaptive toll pricing — lower tolls for off-peak hours, preferential rates for public transport and goods carriers.

  • Push for government infrastructure finance — when possible, build highways with public funds so citizens need not pay tolls at all.

  • Monitor profit vs. maintenance costs — require periodic audits of whether toll increases truly reflect genuine cost increases, not corporate profit margins.

A Broader Governance Challenge

This issue is more than just about tolls. It exposes a tension between private profit incentives and public interest. In circular-governance terms, we need to redesign our infrastructure contracts so they reinvest value back into communities — not extract wealth from them indefinitely.

Until we challenge the assumption that toll roads are forever private profiteering ventures, we will continue paying more — not because roads get better, but because the contracts demand returns.

So the real question is not just why are toll fees increasing, but why do we keep agreeing to pay them — without ever asking when they will go down?

RAMON IKE V. SENERES

www.facebook.com/ike.seneres iseneres@yahoo.com senseneres.blogspot.com 09-14-2026

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