ETC mess needs sorting quickly: China Daily editorial

It has been nearly a year since the transportation department started to promote the use of electronic toll collection, painting a rosy picture of its use throughout the country.

It was claimed that ETC would speed up traffic through tollgates, and its wide adoption would reduce the operating costs for toll stations, with the savings being passed on to drivers in the form of lower toll fees.

With all the related departments having made everything ready for its use, ETC’s rollout was highly anticipated.

Unfortunately, the reality has failed to live up to the billing.

Since the New Year, nearly all toll stations nationwide have only one toll lane available for drivers wanting to pay by cash, with all the rest being ETC lanes. But instead of it being easier and quicker to pass through the tollgates, drivers are complaining about it being slower and more costly as they claim they have been overcharged. Some truck drivers have complained their payments have been hiked by 40 percent. Some have even complained that they have been charged differently each time for the same sections of expressway.

The Ministry of Transportation has responded to the deluge of complaints by saying that some ETC systems are experiencing teething troubles and need to be further adjusted, and that the ETC charge is more precise than before, so it is possible that drivers can be charged more than they paid before the same section of expressways. The ministry even said that trucks are being charged in a different way and so empty lorries will be charged more than they used to pay.

However, drivers do not buy these explanations, and the nationwide mess the introduction of ETC tollgates has created suggests that the ministry has done a very bad job in making necessary preparations for the new system and in adjusting charges reasonably.

There were ETC tollgates already and it should not be difficult to have more such gates, and there should be no technical and technological problems. It is not convincing to claim that the new ETC system has technical problems. Even if drivers are charged more precisely than they were before, that precision should mean drivers are not overcharged. It is ridiculous for toll stations to charge a different amount of money for drivers to use the same section of expressway on different occasions.

The Ministry of Transportation needs to conduct fact-finding missions to find out whether some local toll stations are making illegal gains by taking advantage of this opportunity. Investigations should also be conducted to find out if there has been any rent-seeking in ETC installation projects, which may have resulted in low quality ETC tollgates.

The ministry will not win back people’s trust if it cannot solve these problems. If it has enough concern for people’s interest, it should spare no efforts to address the ETC mess as soon as possible.