After just a single day of driving into the city, a tourist to Sydney was surprised to discover that he owed $45 in toll fees.
On the weekend, the motorist posted an image of the bill, claiming that they had driven to Darlinghurst and returned while instructing their GPS to take the quickest route possible, including tolls.
I did not anticipate paying close to $50 in fees. Is this typical? Online, the driver wrote.
Commenters on the post responded that, regrettably, “when you travel every toll route available in and out of the city,” this wasn’t rare.
One person commented, “NorthConnex plus the M2 and the Lane Cove tunnel cost you $21 and I think saved you maybe 10 minutes.”
Another person said, “Them costs are with a tag; number plate recognition is an additional 60c for each of those.”
A third person bemoaned Sydney being the city with “the highest road tolls in the world.”
However, a few residents gave some suggestions on how to effectively dodge the costs.
One person noted that the times when the tolls would be “worth it” were often when children were dropping off and picking up from school since the highways were “swarming with schools.”
“The time you save using the Lane Cove, NorthConnex, and M2 is not worth $20 otherwise.”
One commenter brought up the fact that the individual was coming from Sydney’s north.
The best route, they said, would have been to take the Pacific Highway to Gordon and then left onto the M2 at North Ryde.
That is a substantially quicker route to the northern end of NorthConnex and would have saved you roughly $30.
One person mentioned GPS programmes like Waze, which may provide you with various route possibilities and a somewhat good approximation of their cost and duration.
Additionally, Transport NSW has a toll calculator website that displays the total fees for any chosen route.
Many customers complained that the NorthConnex and the M2, which both charge more than $8 for a journey, were particularly expensive.
The Sydney Orbital Network’s M2 Hills Motorway was inaugurated in 1997.
Sydney’s newest toll road, the $3 billion NorthConnex, a 9 km twin tube tunnel, opens in 2020.
The Sydney Orbital Network is finished, and a quick-moving highway around the city is now available.