KINIBIZ Just when Tiger thought that she, not being a driver, will be exempted from paying tolls, she too, was slapped with a RM2.50 fare at the Kerinchi Link toll while Ubering back to the office from the brand new Menara Miti along Jalan Sultan Haji Ahmad Shah on Tuesday afternoon.

Year after year, it inevitably comes to a point where the government has to decide - to raise toll rates or not to? To extend the highway concessionaires or to keep them as it is? These riddles clearly have no clear-cut answers and whatever decisions made come with long-lasting implications and often times much public discontent.

Just when motorists and road users think that the situation could not possibly get worse from less than two months back, where the toll rates of 17 intracity highways were raised concurrently, here we are slapped with the news of another potential toll hike by Plus, the country’s biggest highway concessionaire - this time possibly affecting the whole of peninsular Malaysia.

A clearly politically unpopular move at a point where the imposition of the Goods and Services Tax (GST) already heightened inflationary pressures and when the weaker ringgit hurt consumer sentiments, raising toll hikes at this point is almost “suicidal”, to put it in the words of PKR secretary-general Rafizi Ramli, who said that in response to the previous round of toll hikes.

Hence Tiger wonders, can the government actually choose not to raise toll rates and what are the resulting implications?

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This article was written by Sherilyn Goh.