Monday, September 24, 2012

The Status of Road Tolls in Europe

Tolling of cars in the European Union (Road pricing, Aug. 30, 2012)

Also discussed here: Truck tolls/HGV road user charging in the European Union (Road Pricing, Aug. 29, 2012)

Today we summarize a post from the blog “Road Pricing” that describes the present state of tolls in the 27 countries that make up the European Union (excluding Norway and Switzerland) which are divided into two categories: cars and trucks and into two approaches: charging by time (vignette) or distance (VMT). At present there are 13 countries with tolling systems for cars and 7 for trucks with 1 more planning for cars
  and 4 more for trucks.
.  

Key Quotes:  

The clear trends are to either have extensive conventional (manual) tolled highway networks, or to charge for access to their networks either by time or distance”  

For Cars

Toll with physical barriers (distance-based charge) - 6 Member States have extensive toll road systems, using manual tolls (universally with electronic options). These being Ireland, France, Spain, Italy, Greece and Poland”

Vignette (time-based charge) - 7 Member States have vignette systems, whereby access is bought in advance for periods ranging from 4 days to one year. These countries are Austria, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria”

 “Vignette under preparation - Belgium is the only EU Member State currently considering introducing a vignette for private cars”

Electronic Network wide toll (distance based charge) - Curiously, Portugal gets this classification because it does have a growing number of fully electronic free flow toll roads”  

For trucks:

Vignettes (a charge based on pre-paying for access to the network for a period ranging from one day to one year). At present Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and Lithuania have national vignette systems”

 “Countries developing vignette systems. At present, the UK and Latvia are both developing vignette systems”

 “Electronic network wide tolling (with distance charging) In the US this might be called "VMT". This covers both GPS based and DSRC based distance tolling. It includes the well known examples in Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic”

 “Countries developing electronic network wide tolling. Denmark, Belgium, France and Hungary”

Manual tolls. This seems to only include countries with significant amounts of tolling, as it includes Ireland, France, Spain, Italy, Slovenia and Greece only”
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