Steer Davies Gleave

Helping our client through a complicated financing process enabled Santiago to become the first city to successfully implement free-flow ETC toll roads in Latin America.

Our role

Santiago has been one of the first cities to implement a network of urban toll roads operated through free-flow Electronic Toll Collection (ETC) technology. The system allows users to enter the toll road without any physical restriction, using a post payment process to collect fees. There are several advantages to ETC – no need for expensive plazas and barriers, no delays at the barrier for each payment, greater flexibility and lower transaction costs – but there were also relevant revenue risks for our client to consider.

We acted as traffic advisors on the project, bringing specialist expertise to:

• develop traffic and revenue models to obtain forecasts;
• provide technology audits and advice on the financing process; and
• support the client in front of rating agencies, financial advisors, reinsurance companies and investors.

How we did it

We prepared complex network assignment models, covering the whole city of Santiago. These models were used to estimate traffic and revenue for 20 years.

We also developed a detailed methodology to estimate leakage on each project, in order to adjust revenue forecasts and recognise some level of losses due to technical failure and user fraud.

Detailed traffic and revenue risk analyses were undertaken in order to assess the robustness of each business case.

A combination of local knowledge and vast international experience of the team, helped to provide robust support to the financing business case in front of third parties, under a complicated scenario given the novelty of the system and technologies involved.

Around US$ 610 million was financed through local and international infrastructure bonds in both processes.

For more information contact

Ricardo Montechino

t +56 (0)2 757 2600
e ricardo.montechino@sdgworld.net

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