156 Toll Road Study and Appendices - Transportation Agency for ...

Tolling Traffic and Revenue Study Highway 156 CorridorTraffic and Revenue AnalysisRevenue SchedulesFinancial feasibility analysis required a toll revenue schedule for a 40-year period.Calculation of the revenue schedule requires traffic forecasts on Highway 156 for theopening year for both Phase 1 (2021) and the horizon year (2035) conditions. Theconversion from traffic forecasts to a revenue schedule was dependent on a number ofelements including the revenue schedule start year, the inflation rate, annualization factor,and a “ramp-up” factor.Start YearToll revenues are not collected until the construction of Route 156 West Corridor Phase 1has been completed and the roadway improvements are opened to traffic. Thus, theopening year is the first year following the end of the construction schedule. This studyassumed the opening year of Phase 1 to be 2021.Creation of Full ScheduleThe forecasting process provided average annual weekday and weekend day traffic and tollrevenue for years 2021 and 2035. The financial analysis required toll revenue forecasts forall years from project opening in 2021 to the end of the bond repayment period in 2061.Forecasts of revenue for years from 2022 to 2034 were derived by linear interpolation ofthe 2021 and 2035 forecasts.The plan to use all-electronic, open road toll (ORT) collection requires special considerationin the revenue analysis. Implementation of ORT would likely have two major impacts ongross toll revenue. First, because of its cashless nature and the associated privacy issuesperceived by some, a minority of travelers will chose not to use an ORT system. Second,complete ORT systems incur unreadable video images and have higher occurrences ofuncollectible accounts. This study accounts for these effect and assumed a 5% reduction intoll facility traffic to reflect the privacy issue, and an additional 5% reduction in grossrevenue to account for unreadable video images and uncollectible accounts.Inflation RateAll monetary elements (travel costs, and value of time) of the forecasts use year 2012dollars, but the financial model needs revenues in the year of accrual. Year 2012 dollarswere inflated at a rate of 2.5% to yield year of accrual dollars.Toll IncreasesThis study assumes that tolls increase annually with inflation, assuming a traditional publicsector financing, and is appropriate for a sketch analysis. Also, since toll collection will beimplemented completely using ORT, frequent toll rate adjustments are practical.Accordingly toll rates were converted to year of accrual by applying a toll inflation rate of2.5% annually.16