Commercial vehicle owners will soon pay far less to use national highways featuring costly structures such as tunnels, bridges, flyovers and elevated stretches. The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH) has amended the National Highway Fee Rules?2008, reducing toll calculations for these segments by as much as 50?per?cent.
Under the notification of 2?July, the tollable length of any highway section that consists wholly or partly of a structure is now whichever is smaller: ten times the structure’s own length, or five times the total section length. Only half of that computed distance is then billed at the standard per kilometre rate.
MoRTH illustrated the change with a 40 kilometre section made entirely of structures. Instead of being charged on 400?kilometres (the former rule of ten times the length), the fee will now be based on 200?kilometres—five times the section length—and only half of that, 100?kilometres, will attract the user charge.
