Then you have Austria, where, apart from the vignette, you also have extra-paid mountain passes, but that is not shown on the map.
But due to road construction work in Germany, we ended up driving on Austrian roads for a few kilometres. Two months later, we got a fine for driving in Austria without a vignette, and now we have to pay €200 for a sticker that costs €13 for 10 days!
Worst part? The original fine letter never got delivered, so now our case is being passed on to the Austrian authorities. Based on what I've read online, people have had to pay anywhere between €300 and €3,000 for this :/
Especially given 99.99%* of tolled roads are purely convenience ones: highways, large bridges over estuaries or chasms one used to route around...
*putting a 0.01% margin of error there so that I don't say "100%" and some smartass digs out the couple of exceptions in all of Europe
You don't mention your country - what is the situation there wrt. medical expenses?
Medical expenses? Public healthcare, but there are per-visit costs in the 20€ range, somewhat more for hospital stays, maximum per year 815€, after that they become free.
People often have employer-provided private healthcare on top of that though, including me.
For prescription medicines there is a 636€ limit per year (after 70€ per year the cost of the medication starts being reimbursable even before that), after that any medication costs 2.5€ per purchase.
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.
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.
Whether the latter offsets the former to a significant margin appears to be the matter of debate implied here.
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.
However it's not straight forward to figure out the optimal way to get from say Hamburg to Gothenburg. You can take the short ferry from Fehmarn to Rodby, and then take the bridges. Or you can drive all the way via Odense and the bridges. Or you can drive to northern Denmark and take the ferry from Fredrickshavn over. Or you can go to Kiel and take the overnight ferry straight to Gothenburg, which is expensive but you can sleep all the way. Then there is the Travemünde-Trelleborg ferry which could also be an option...
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.
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!
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.
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.
A 100 km drive would easily cost 2000 Rs (20 eur) on new highways.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
For health care, your only competition is disease and death.
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.
The expectation that the service gets either better for the same amount, or cheaper for the same service, is usually naive