15 hours ago
Oresund Bridge is £58 to cross. Is the toll just daylight robbery?
For four centuries the Oresund, a strait between Denmark and Sweden that is the gateway to the Baltic Sea, was a geopolitical chokepoint.
The Danish kings would routinely top up their treasury by extorting transit fees from passing ships. In 1658 the Swedes got their own back by crossing the frozen waters and surrounding Copenhagen.
Urban legend holds that there is still a law on Denmark's statute books that permits loyal Danes to take up a cudgel and bash any Swede attempting to traverse the ice. The sound last became passable on foot in 1996 but no heads were staved in.
Four years after that, though, Sweden and Denmark opened a five-mile, €2.6 billion bridge across the strait, whose 25th birthday falls on Tuesday. The kings and queens of both countries will mark the occasion by travelling in a convoy from the Swedish side to the Danish one, pausing halfway on the island of Peberholm.
The bridge has become a symbol of European integration, all but turning Copenhagen and the Swedish port of Malmo on the other side of the water into a single conurbation.
'There is a before and after the bridge,' said Linus Eriksson, the chief executive of the company that runs it. 'Before the bridge, Malmo was a town in crisis. Even Copenhagen had a tough situation. Both cities had a tough situation with poor growth. Now it's a totally different region economically.'
The crossing was also made famous from Tijuana to Bulawayo by The Bridge, a noirish crime drama in which a chilly Swedish detective called Saga Noren and her Danish partner Martin Rohde solved a series of grisly trans-strait murders.
Now, however, many commuters who bought into the dream of living in one country and working in the other are complaining of what they regard as a lower-level but higher-volume crime: daylight robbery.
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Weeks before the anniversary, the basic price for a one-way car journey across the bridge has been jacked up to 510 Danish kroner, or £58. For the largest vans, it is the equivalent of £218.
Research by Sydsvenskan, a regional newspaper in southern Sweden, suggests this is by far the most expensive bridge toll on the planet, costing about twice as much as its nearest rivals in Japan and Canada.
Tommy Frandsen, a Danish warehouse manager, is the embodiment of the Oresund ideal. He lives in Staffanstorp, a Swedish town 12 miles from the bridge, and commutes across it every weekday to his workplace on the Danish side.
Even though he gets a reduced rate, this now costs him nearly £350 a month, or slightly more than 10 per cent of his salary after tax. 'I feel like it's terrible because they raise the prices every year,' Frandsen said. 'The ferry is not an option. The train is not a possibility because I live out in the country and there's no trains from here.'
Aravin Chakravarthi, who is based in Malmo but works in Hedehusene, Denmark, said he could not afford to traverse the bridge by car and was forced to take longer rail journeys instead. 'I don't drive by car because of the bridge toll, even on desperate days when I'm juggling tight schedules to drop off or pick up my two kids,' he said.
Although the bridge consortium is jointly owned by the Swedish and Danish states, it is financed with sizeable loans, which have to be paid back.
The toll is also linked by law to the cost of the privately operated ferry that runs between Helsingor and Helsingborg further up the strait, to protect the commercial viability of the latter.
'We are state-owned, so we would not be able to cut the price by half because then the commercially operated ferry company would complain or even sue us,' said Eriksson.
Despite the vehicle toll, the total number of people crossing the Oresund by car, train or ferry hit a record 38 million last year, equivalent to about 105,000 trips a day. A one-way railway journey between central Copenhagen and Malmo typically costs only £13.
Locals' sentimental attachment to the bridge remains largely undiminished. 'It has created love relationships. It has created party culture and university research,' said Niels Paarup-Petersen, a Swedish Centre Party MP from Malmo. 'There are such gains that have actually become a reality because of the bridge.'
