Tag discount technology not invented - NRA

THE NATIONAL Roads Authority (NRA) has said the technology necessary to allow motorists who use electronic tags to claim toll discounts across the roads network has not been invented.

Consequently, the authority said, it is not intended to allow such tag-using motorists claim a discount of 10 per cent in toll fees for pre-paying toll charges for more then 20 journeys.

The NRA, which has heavily promoted the electronic tags, said that while they are inter-operable in terms of deducting money from motorists’ accounts to pay individual road toll operators, the technology to pass back bulk-buying discounts on toll fees “would be exceedingly complex, difficult and costly”.

The NRA said such a system was not in place anywhere in the world and would require each tag to effectively have a separate account for each toll plaza. “Besides its complexity and costliness, such an approach would cause confusion and frustration for customers,” a spokesperson for the authority said. “It is not difficult to envisage an incident where a customer may have significant credit on his tag for one or more plazas but be unable to pass through another because his general balance was not in credit.”

However, Fine Gael Transport spokesman Fergus O’Dowd has accused the authority of creating “a rip-off on a rip-off”. He said he didn’t believe state-of-the-art technology – developed to get credit out of tags to different toll plazas – could not be tweaked to reduce the cost of toll fees for tags.

Well-placed transport sources also suggested the NRA – or any private operator – could establish an electronic tag that does offer the discounts to motorists across all tolls.

“The ideal entity to do this is a big issuer of tags, such as the NRA itself. It is difficult to believe it could not sit down with toll operators and find a way to reduce the cost of toll by 10 per cent for tag holders – by definition, big customers.”

NRA spokesman Sean O’Neill said the range of tag providers and toll facilities made the situation very complex and numbers of tag providers could not be limited because of competition rules. “It is like Nama – very complex,” he quipped.

As revealed in The Irish Timeslast week, provision for discounts of 10 per cent for motorists who pre-pay more than 20 journeys in advance were enshrined in the toll agreements for the M4, M8 and M1.