Spaniards don’t like toll roads and have been hoping to drive fewer and fewer such roads in the future. But Brussels has other plans, no matter what the current government says.
Most of the country’s toll roads stem from a system put in place in the ‘80s and ‘90s that put building these new highways in private hands to avoid spending public money on the projects. The private company was then allowed to collect tolls on them for a certain number of years to recover its investment. It had to maintain the road, as well, until its management reverted completely to the government. Spaniards had hoped to be alleviated from many of these tolls, which are found on some of the country’s principal arteries of travel. Nevertheless, Spain has an overall deficit of about €10 million owed to road maintenance in the country. Ironically, the toll roads are often in near-perfect condition because drivers take older, smaller roads precisely to avoid what are sometimes significant fees. These two-lane country highways have then become good examples of the lack of investment in road maintenance in recent years.
The topic became an issue in the general elections in 2023 when Spanish media revealed that the country had committed to implementing a so-called pay-for-use system of highways as part of the deal with Brussels for its share of NextGeneration funds, the post-COVID economic recovery program. Instead of seeing the number of toll roads decrease, Spaniards could expect to see them increase. It’s a model of motor transportation the bloc agreed to generalize and homogenize in a single system called a viñete that would charge motorists on certain roads according to several factors, including the type of car, its weight, time spent on the road, and the number of passengers it carried.
When the subject became an election issue, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez denied there were any imminent plans to implement such a system, despite the clear statements from technicians of the transport ministry to the contrary. In the days ahead of the nationwide vote, Sánchez managed to negotiate with Brussels a delay in getting the system up and running. But while the PM reassured the public it wouldn’t have to pay to use highways, Brussels’ policy had not fundamentally changed.
El Debate reports that now, Brussels is after Spain once again. This week, it reminded Spain that the pay-per-use system should already have been up and running by March and that it could not use any EU funds on road maintenance until it is. According to the news source, the government gave Brussels another evasive response, stating that it was implementing fees on large trucks.
The fact of the matter is that the pay-per-use system is extremely unpopular in Spain and Sánchez can hardly afford to do anything that will decrease his popularity.
There are seven other countries that the Commission is also attempting to call to heel on the issue of pay-per-use as they too have yet to implement the system: Portugal, Italy, Bulgaria, Luxembourg, Malta, Poland, and Greece.
