Funny thing (sort of) about Switzerland (not included in this)... it costs 40chf (about $50) per year to use the highways and some tunnels. Even if you're just passing through you have to pay it to drive on the highways. The joke is that everyone in Europe just pays the fee except for the Dutch, which is why you see so many yellow license plates trying to drive on rural roads, through mountain passes...
They tried to change the system maybe ten years ago. They needed funds to build a tunnel under lake Geneva. So they wanted to raise the fee to 100chf but have a much cheaper option (I can't remember how much) for people just passing through. But the referendum didn't pass so we're still at 40chf and I assume the tunnel won't be built.
I take issue with the toll methodology. It counts tolled roads, but that doesn't give you any idea how much your trip would cost. In Poland, only slightly over 20% of A highways are tolled, with over 90% of highways being free if you count in S express motorways, which are usually highway-grade if built in recent years. This map basically approximates what it would cost to drive only those scattered licensed stretches. In practice, you may tour the country for free, with exceptions like Berlin–Warsaw, where it only makes sense to pay.
Then you have Austria, where, apart from the vignette, you also have extra-paid mountain passes, but that is not shown on the map.
I recognise the site is about driving costs, ignoring what a car costs to own; but depending on what plates stick to that car, it can make a significant difference. Denmark already tops the list in petrol prices, but unmentioned (largely because it's irrelevant) is that cars have a 150% registration fee attached to them, before the annual ownership fees.
I have a 1998 Citroën Xantia Activa V6, it costs ~1450 EUR a year to keep it on plates. Yes, its due to its fuel economy, but since I only drive it occasionally, it's hardly doing damage to the environment. I also have a 2011 Citroën C1, which only costs ~95 EUR a year. Of course, I was truly unhappy about these costs, I would take the Xantia off plates; however, it's more an observation: due to the high fees for merely owning a vehicle, a lot of car owners are encouraged to drive. And that's just the annual fees, buying a new car is such an investment, that it would feel a mistake to not drive it (I assume, I have never bought a new car).
I'm speculating of course, but it seems to me that these fees on car ownership encourages more driving. I'd love to have data from countries with lower (or no) fees, and how much people are driving per car. There is a reason Danish politicians about talking about replacing it with road pricing, or at least a mix.
I'll preface this by saying that I am not debating whenever this is good or bad.
The point here is to make car ownership inconvenient and unaffordable so any implication that it encourages more driving is false by default as there will be less cars on the road to begin with.
I think both you and parent can easily be correct simultaneously. It is possible for both of these things to be true: there being less cars on the road and people who are in the remainder of cars on the road driving more than they would normally had the taxes been lower.
Whether the latter offsets the former to a significant margin appears to be the matter of debate implied here.
Yes very interesting point: we only count the cost of the trip itself, not owning the car.
Registration and annual fees are a whole other layer, and Denmark might extreme case, tough Netherlands isnt much better.
I don't have data on driving per car versus ownership fees, but it would be a interesting comparison, and it fits with why road pricing keeps coming up in Denmark.
It’s a ticket for use of the interstate, basically. Used to be a bit of paper you’d stick in your windscreen, now it’s electronic in a lot of places. Rather than a toll, which may be additionally applicable, it’s a standing fee valid for a set period.
They’re usually inexpensive. Most countries have clear and repeated signs telling you you need one, etc.
Slovenia - last I was there - don’t have a single sign on the way into the country. They don’t tell you at the toll post on the border.
What they do have is cops with binoculars sitting in the median flagging down every foreign plated car, and then issuing a fixed €200 fine (they’re ready with a card machine), and telling you you have to buy a vignette at the next gas station, which is where they’re sold.
Anyway. Wildly irregular across Europe. Useful site!
If I remember from my time in Europe the key difference between the vignette and something like an EZ-Tag is the vignette isn't necessarily tied to the registration of your vehicle like the ones in the States are. You can usually walk into the gas stations in europe and just buy them for periods of time like you say.
And yeah, they don't tell you. If you're driving europe cross country, best get your armchair lawyer book out and plan on strategically buying them as soon as you enter the country.
I think 40 Swiss Francs per year is a really fair price, if you live there and use the Autobahn regularly it's very cheap per km and if you happen to drive through you also have to pay, which is only fair to residents. but 40 francs flatrate even if you only pass through is still better than whatever is going on in france!
That said if we're counting bridge/ferry in other countries why not also count it in Switzerland? (Ferry: Horgen and Beckenried, for trains: Lotschberg, Furka, Simplon, Vereina)
Because its not a major source of revenue and not primary income for road maintenance (swiss have stellar overall road quality compared to neighbours), and mostly intended for foreigners to not overuse swiss highways in summer & winter tourist seasons.
This can happen easily due to location of Switzerland. Its true that inflation is basically non-existent here, something about fiscal discipline and overall highly moral population not afraid of work (unlike france or italy for example), and thus also government. Overall country is low to medium tax place so vignette price is in line with that.
Follow a bit their politics a bit and their domestic affairs and you will quickly note how unusual that population and this country is. Best place overall for me to live and raise my kids, thats for sure.
That's nothing compared to the daytime robbery on the Indian roads (aka tolls). Someone builds a small bridge, hardly a few meters long, and gets license to collect tolls.
A 100 km drive would easily cost 2000 Rs (20 eur) on new highways.
The whole travelling seems to get more expensive with gas prices effecting everything else also, its not just "everything goes" in a holiday, better to plan a bit.
Glad I got a toll badge covering Italy, Spain and Portugal so the amount gets auto deducted every month, instead having to pay each individual toll segment.
Anyway, the A25 heading from Salamanca Spain into Portugal is now toll free, same as some of the roads around Barcelona/Catalonia. So it's not all bad.
That's a very strange statement to me. In my experience, France has extremely high motorway quality, one of the absolute best in Europe. Comparing with autobahn, there's no competition. And this is without even including supporting infrastructure like aires.
Yes, exactly, last time driving from Reims to Paris and then to Belgium started to really think about that when driving in toll after another, week after that started to work on this.
It was initially a fixed term contract to build and exploit the roads, where government had 50% stake in the company. When the contract reached its term, instead of keeping operating the roads, government sold its stake. That started a massive hike in prices, firing of thousands employees.
I mean that is often times true. But efficiency in this context - particularly with infrastructure - usually means extracting most profit while providing the bare minimum of service.
The expectation that the service gets either better for the same amount, or cheaper for the same service, is usually naive
The lesson here is that in situations where you have a clear public good that (almost) everyone needs and consumes, like roads and infrastructure, it's better for (almost) everyone if the government simply pays for it out of the general fund and doesn't try to nickle-and-dime the populace to tax "usage".
Sadly if you flip that around and talk about other public goods like "health care," (almost) everyone walks across the aisle of the same principles and starts arguing in the opposite direction.
> The lesson here is that in situations where you have a clear public good that (almost) everyone needs and consumes, like roads and infrastructure, it's better for (almost) everyone if the government simply pays for it out of the general fund and doesn't try to nickle-and-dime the populace to tax "usage".
I don't know how you took that from the article, especially the impression that almost everyone uses any particular piece of infrastructure. Most infrastructure will be used by a minority of the populace. Use fees are a fair way to fund infrastructure needed by its users.
Fair use ends when private for profit enters the discussion, then the only goal is maximizing private income from necessary infrastructure meant to serve whole population.
France has most expensive highway travel in whole Europe only due to incompetent bureaucrats. Nothing fair there, other countries (apart from half-defunct Italy) have figured out things better with better resulting quality too.
I'd say the opposite. Roads have competition in trains, and subsidizing them at the expense of trains seems like a bad idea if trains are actually more efficient. Let them both compete on their merits un-subsidized.
For health care, your only competition is disease and death.
> The lesson here is that in situations where you have a clear public good that (almost) everyone needs and consumes, like roads and infrastructure, it's better for (almost) everyone if the government simply pays for it out of the general fund and doesn't try to nickle-and-dime the populace to tax "usage".
Why is that the lesson? That's not obvious to me at all.
Taxing roads can still have a worthwhile steering effect, can be used to even cost as local tax payers are not necessarily the main beneficiaries of the roads, or can make large infrastructure projects like tunnels or giant bridges worthwhile.
Obviously, there's also arguments for free access.
Funny thing (sort of) about Switzerland (not included in this)... it costs 40chf (about $50) per year to use the highways and some tunnels. Even if you're just passing through you have to pay it to drive on the highways. The joke is that everyone in Europe just pays the fee except for the Dutch, which is why you see so many yellow license plates trying to drive on rural roads, through mountain passes...
They tried to change the system maybe ten years ago. They needed funds to build a tunnel under lake Geneva. So they wanted to raise the fee to 100chf but have a much cheaper option (I can't remember how much) for people just passing through. But the referendum didn't pass so we're still at 40chf and I assume the tunnel won't be built.
I take issue with the toll methodology. It counts tolled roads, but that doesn't give you any idea how much your trip would cost. In Poland, only slightly over 20% of A highways are tolled, with over 90% of highways being free if you count in S express motorways, which are usually highway-grade if built in recent years. This map basically approximates what it would cost to drive only those scattered licensed stretches. In practice, you may tour the country for free, with exceptions like Berlin–Warsaw, where it only makes sense to pay.
Then you have Austria, where, apart from the vignette, you also have extra-paid mountain passes, but that is not shown on the map.
I recognise the site is about driving costs, ignoring what a car costs to own; but depending on what plates stick to that car, it can make a significant difference. Denmark already tops the list in petrol prices, but unmentioned (largely because it's irrelevant) is that cars have a 150% registration fee attached to them, before the annual ownership fees.
I have a 1998 Citroën Xantia Activa V6, it costs ~1450 EUR a year to keep it on plates. Yes, its due to its fuel economy, but since I only drive it occasionally, it's hardly doing damage to the environment. I also have a 2011 Citroën C1, which only costs ~95 EUR a year. Of course, I was truly unhappy about these costs, I would take the Xantia off plates; however, it's more an observation: due to the high fees for merely owning a vehicle, a lot of car owners are encouraged to drive. And that's just the annual fees, buying a new car is such an investment, that it would feel a mistake to not drive it (I assume, I have never bought a new car).
I'm speculating of course, but it seems to me that these fees on car ownership encourages more driving. I'd love to have data from countries with lower (or no) fees, and how much people are driving per car. There is a reason Danish politicians about talking about replacing it with road pricing, or at least a mix.
I'll preface this by saying that I am not debating whenever this is good or bad.
The point here is to make car ownership inconvenient and unaffordable so any implication that it encourages more driving is false by default as there will be less cars on the road to begin with.
I think both you and parent can easily be correct simultaneously. It is possible for both of these things to be true: there being less cars on the road and people who are in the remainder of cars on the road driving more than they would normally had the taxes been lower.
Whether the latter offsets the former to a significant margin appears to be the matter of debate implied here.
Yes very interesting point: we only count the cost of the trip itself, not owning the car. Registration and annual fees are a whole other layer, and Denmark might extreme case, tough Netherlands isnt much better.
I don't have data on driving per car versus ownership fees, but it would be a interesting comparison, and it fits with why road pricing keeps coming up in Denmark.
Thank you for keeping care of that Citroën Activa. A car that must be preserved for its historical and technological significance.
https://youtu.be/lZXaexvA7p0
https://youtu.be/EZ_3HRMy2js
Us Americans (pun intended) have no idea what “vignette” means in this context. And our dictionaries don’t, either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vignette_(road_tax)
Basically an EZ-Pass.
It’s a ticket for use of the interstate, basically. Used to be a bit of paper you’d stick in your windscreen, now it’s electronic in a lot of places. Rather than a toll, which may be additionally applicable, it’s a standing fee valid for a set period.
They’re usually inexpensive. Most countries have clear and repeated signs telling you you need one, etc.
Slovenia - last I was there - don’t have a single sign on the way into the country. They don’t tell you at the toll post on the border.
What they do have is cops with binoculars sitting in the median flagging down every foreign plated car, and then issuing a fixed €200 fine (they’re ready with a card machine), and telling you you have to buy a vignette at the next gas station, which is where they’re sold.
Anyway. Wildly irregular across Europe. Useful site!
If I remember from my time in Europe the key difference between the vignette and something like an EZ-Tag is the vignette isn't necessarily tied to the registration of your vehicle like the ones in the States are. You can usually walk into the gas stations in europe and just buy them for periods of time like you say.
And yeah, they don't tell you. If you're driving europe cross country, best get your armchair lawyer book out and plan on strategically buying them as soon as you enter the country.
I think 40 Swiss Francs per year is a really fair price, if you live there and use the Autobahn regularly it's very cheap per km and if you happen to drive through you also have to pay, which is only fair to residents. but 40 francs flatrate even if you only pass through is still better than whatever is going on in france!
That said if we're counting bridge/ferry in other countries why not also count it in Switzerland? (Ferry: Horgen and Beckenried, for trains: Lotschberg, Furka, Simplon, Vereina)
What I find amazing is that the price hasn't changed in years, it was already 40 CHF when I lived there in 2003 - 4.
Because its not a major source of revenue and not primary income for road maintenance (swiss have stellar overall road quality compared to neighbours), and mostly intended for foreigners to not overuse swiss highways in summer & winter tourist seasons.
This can happen easily due to location of Switzerland. Its true that inflation is basically non-existent here, something about fiscal discipline and overall highly moral population not afraid of work (unlike france or italy for example), and thus also government. Overall country is low to medium tax place so vignette price is in line with that.
Follow a bit their politics a bit and their domestic affairs and you will quickly note how unusual that population and this country is. Best place overall for me to live and raise my kids, thats for sure.
That's nothing compared to the daytime robbery on the Indian roads (aka tolls). Someone builds a small bridge, hardly a few meters long, and gets license to collect tolls.
A 100 km drive would easily cost 2000 Rs (20 eur) on new highways.
The whole travelling seems to get more expensive with gas prices effecting everything else also, its not just "everything goes" in a holiday, better to plan a bit.
Glad I got a toll badge covering Italy, Spain and Portugal so the amount gets auto deducted every month, instead having to pay each individual toll segment. Anyway, the A25 heading from Salamanca Spain into Portugal is now toll free, same as some of the roads around Barcelona/Catalonia. So it's not all bad.
Which is why during Summer weekends my Portuguese hometown at the end of A25 feels like a Spanish city. :)
It is shocking to me how expensive the roads are in France, and you don’t get any quality for it either
That's a very strange statement to me. In my experience, France has extremely high motorway quality, one of the absolute best in Europe. Comparing with autobahn, there's no competition. And this is without even including supporting infrastructure like aires.
Yes, exactly, last time driving from Reims to Paris and then to Belgium started to really think about that when driving in toll after another, week after that started to work on this.
That's because the State delegated construction and exploitation to private entities.
It was initially a fixed term contract to build and exploit the roads, where government had 50% stake in the company. When the contract reached its term, instead of keeping operating the roads, government sold its stake. That started a massive hike in prices, firing of thousands employees.
In our data France is infact the dearest per kilometre, now when taking a closer look: about €11 per 100 km for a car, more for a camper.
The motorways are run by private concession companies, which is why each stretch has its own booth price.
Free alternative are the N and D roads, slower but toll-free, which is often how locals do longer trips on a budget.
In the US they keep telling us that private companies are more efficient than government.
I mean that is often times true. But efficiency in this context - particularly with infrastructure - usually means extracting most profit while providing the bare minimum of service.
The expectation that the service gets either better for the same amount, or cheaper for the same service, is usually naive
The lesson here is that in situations where you have a clear public good that (almost) everyone needs and consumes, like roads and infrastructure, it's better for (almost) everyone if the government simply pays for it out of the general fund and doesn't try to nickle-and-dime the populace to tax "usage".
Sadly if you flip that around and talk about other public goods like "health care," (almost) everyone walks across the aisle of the same principles and starts arguing in the opposite direction.
> The lesson here is that in situations where you have a clear public good that (almost) everyone needs and consumes, like roads and infrastructure, it's better for (almost) everyone if the government simply pays for it out of the general fund and doesn't try to nickle-and-dime the populace to tax "usage".
I don't know how you took that from the article, especially the impression that almost everyone uses any particular piece of infrastructure. Most infrastructure will be used by a minority of the populace. Use fees are a fair way to fund infrastructure needed by its users.
Fair use ends when private for profit enters the discussion, then the only goal is maximizing private income from necessary infrastructure meant to serve whole population.
France has most expensive highway travel in whole Europe only due to incompetent bureaucrats. Nothing fair there, other countries (apart from half-defunct Italy) have figured out things better with better resulting quality too.
I'd say the opposite. Roads have competition in trains, and subsidizing them at the expense of trains seems like a bad idea if trains are actually more efficient. Let them both compete on their merits un-subsidized.
For health care, your only competition is disease and death.
> The lesson here is that in situations where you have a clear public good that (almost) everyone needs and consumes, like roads and infrastructure, it's better for (almost) everyone if the government simply pays for it out of the general fund and doesn't try to nickle-and-dime the populace to tax "usage".
Why is that the lesson? That's not obvious to me at all.
Taxing roads can still have a worthwhile steering effect, can be used to even cost as local tax payers are not necessarily the main beneficiaries of the roads, or can make large infrastructure projects like tunnels or giant bridges worthwhile.
Obviously, there's also arguments for free access.
Tolls can be a useful way to steer traffic, it isn’t just a way to generate income.
IMO the lesson here is that driving is still cheap compared to taking trains and we should subsidize the latter and tax the former more.
Li Shaung Wam
Hello! I'm Heikki.
I've been collecting Europe's published toll, vignette and ferry tariffs so road-trip costs can be checked rather than guessed.
The page lists every source and the date we read it, and the full table is downloadable as CSV.
Corrections are welcome, especially for the Great Belt motorhome bands and the countries we don't price yet.
Really cool to see data like that!
Thanks!