Economics and Financing

Revenue derived from road transport related activities is an important source of general income for the Commonwealth and state governments in Australia. This extensive source of revenue is primarily obtained from fuel taxes, sales taxes and registration fees. Although the amount of funding derived from these sources, and in particular fuel taxes, has increased significantly with the continuous growth in traffic, the increase could be expected to slow with technology advances, such as improved fuel efficiency and fuel substitutes, and changes in the demand for road transport. The purpose of this report is to improve the understanding of governments of the outlook for road related revenue and for road transport expenditure needs. The report reviews the historic trends in road transport related revenue, and road transport demand and expenditure, and develops possible future scenarios. It explores a number of important factors likely to have a marked influence on these future scenarios, such as tax reform, impact of rail, new technologies and travel demand management. The scenarios are analysed to assess different outlooks for road related revenues and road transport demand. Finally, policy options that governments may wish to explore to address identified impacts are outlined The analysis described in this report uses the software Scenario ExplorerTM, developed within the scope of this project using national level data. However, the tool's usefulness can be extended to accommodate state level simulations using associated state level data for road related revenues, expenditure and road transport demand. This will require data collected at a state level to populate a state level version of the Scenario ExplorerTM. The software may also be extended to include an emissions module, valuation of externalities, and application to other areas such as public transport and integrated transport. Other enhancements could allow analysis of options such as variable charging