With a week and a half to go until 2022 ends and 2023 begins, many drivers are wondering about the news that will come hand in hand with the new year. One of them could be the toll roads: Isabel Pardo de Vera, Secretary of State for Transport, Mobility and the Urban Agenda, has assured that the system will be ready in the coming months… before the end of the current legislature. And general elections can be held, at the latest, within a year. Yes, the toll roads in Spain already have a date.
Isabel Pardo de Vera was present at an act of the New Economy Forum and Europe Press collected their statements on the toll roads in Spain. The Secretary of State for Transport, Mobility and the Urban Agenda pointed out that The project will be ready in the coming months, before the end of the legislature: “It would be a shame to leave without a perfectly determined model. In the coming months it will be ready so that whoever wants to start it up can do so. And if it’s my turn, I’ll do it without hesitation: the project will be worked on and it can be established without problems”.
Last quarter of 2023
The next general elections do not yet have a date, but, with the political calendar and the electoral law in hand, will be held (at the latest) on December 10, 2023. The aforementioned norm establishes that the mandate of the Cortes ends, exactly, four years after the last elections: November 10, 2019. The dissolution of the chambers must be carried out 25 days before (October 16) and they must spend 54 days between the call and the elections. So the toll roads would arrive before these dates.
The Secretary of State for Transport, Mobility and the Urban Agenda has declared that the toll highways They will only start when inflation eases and other points that continue to contribute economic uncertainty are resolved. He also recalled that this system is an obligation and a commitment to Europe: “It is a requirement coming from Europe, which forces us to establish formulas to maintain safety on the roads. The changes go further and focus on criteria of sustainability, digitization and electrification”.
road maintenance
Isabel Pardo de Vera added that “it is an adaptation to a sustainability model that integrates technology, electrification and digitization to promote road safety, progressivity and territorial cohesion”. And she has remembered: “We must find solutions to the lack of infrastructure maintenance that has existed for too many years.” We are talking about a hole (never better said) that already reaches 8,000 million euros.
Although the General State Budgets have allocated, in 2022, 1,400 million euros for the maintenance of these infrastructures, it is a figure “insufficient” and therefore, they look for an extra and direct source of income.
At the time, the Secretary of Infrastructure, Mobility and Urban Agenda spoke of “pay per use” as a formula for toll highways. If this is the system chosen, we would talk about a soft toll like the one that exists in Portugal: drivers would pay based on the number of kilometers traveled. As pointed out by the Chain BE, the Executive would be assessing a rate of one cent per kilometer for the high capacity roads of the State. A figure that would already appear in the legal draft that contains this measure.
The other proposal would be bullet tolls that already exist in some European countries: a flat annual rate that all drivers would have to pay to be able to drive on these roads.The Economist He cited sources close to the working group of the Ministry of Transport, Mobility and Urban Agenda to reveal that they would be designing a pricing system for which a price of around 80 euros per year would have been proposed for passenger cars.
The example of the Basque Country
The first autonomous community that has established highways for payment has been the Basque Country. Since the beginning of 2022, the tolls of the A-636 (known as the Deskarga dual carriageway) are already in operation. The entire route of 15.5 kilometers costs 2.53 euros for passenger cars and light vehicles, 4.11 euros for light trucks and 5.15 euros for trucks of more than twelve tons. Motorcycles are exempt.
There is also a monthly maximum of 34.47 euros: if there is intensive use of this highway and a driver reaches that amount, they will not continue to be charged. And for these drivers who carry out a high number of trips, there will be discounts 25%, 55% and 75%.