General proceedings - Association mondiale de la Route

• The earmarked tax system was expanded and reinforced to its current size of 5.7 trillion
Yen (US$48 billion) and includes both national and local budgets. The toll road system
incorporated the pooling system and has developed the comprehensive toll expressway
network of more than 8,000km.
• Nowadays, these systems are being modified. The public corporations for toll highways
were recently privatized. In December 2006 the prime minister decided to generalize the
earmarked tax and concrete measures will be discussed in 2007.
• Japan now has an approximately 1,189,000km road network that includes 7,800 km of
expressways and 54,000km of national highways and 128,000km of prefecture roads.
However, about 40% of the planned expressway network is either under construction or
at the planning level, and there are daily traffic congestions in large city areas and on
many national routes.
• Development of the road network require large scale financing and stable financing.
• Beneficiaries from road use must bear the burden
• When a country expects an increase in traffic demand in the future, earmarked tax
systems can be effective because tax revenues related to automobiles increase in
proportion to traffic demand.
• It is possible to introduce toll road systems to cover the cost of development even in
countries with low economic growth rates with some assistance from the government as
long as traffic demand is above certain levels.
• It is important that stable development and maintenance plans are practiced with
corroboration of the earmarked tax system and toll road system.
Title: The importance of infrastructure investments in the urban agglomerations cities
of Africa
Author & Presenter: Mr. Aka Assafou (pictured), Secretary General, African
Association of Public Transport (UATP)
The presenter highlighted on the role of African
Association of Public Transport (UATP) and its
objectives that are to: Gather all the actors of urban,
suburban, regional and interregional public transport of
persons and goods at the scale of the continent; Lead
the necessary reflections to develop organised public
transport in Africa taking into account the social and
economical context of each region; Promote a better
mobility of persons and goods at African scale;
Reinforce Africa voice inside the International Association of Public Transport (UITP) and
generally at international level. He emphasized on challenges that might result into urban
demographic growth. These include: Urban sprawling; uncontrolled urbanisation; poorest
and labour population at the periphery of the towns. Lack of transportation infrastructure
results into problems such as lack of accessibility of basic services for the poorest;
congestion; pollution and road insecurity.
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