Germany to expand truck toll to all federal highways

Germany will extend its truck toll to all national highways from mid-2018 in a bid to raise billions of euros for infrastructure maintenance and modernization, the German government decided on Wednesday.

Currently, the toll is levied on trucks weighing more than 7.5 tonnes on some 13,000 km of highways and 2,300 km of other main roads. On Wednesday, the German government approved the decision to add an additional 37,000 km of federal highways to the toll system beginning in July 2018.

The government forecast the tolls to raise 2 billion euros (about 2.28 billion U.S. dollars) per year. "The revenue will flow directly and lastingly to road maintenance and expansion," said German Transport Minister Alexander Dobrindt in a statement.

However, the decision was criticized by German companies. The German Association for Small and Medium-sized Businesses (BVMW) said the additional tolls would burden SMEs, the German economy's backbone. It urged the government to find other measures to prevent companies from having additional costs.

Germany previously tabled a plan to collect money for improving its transport infrastructure by levying tolls on foreign cars on highways from 2016, but the plan was shelved due to opposition from the European Commission, which said the levy was discriminatory. Endit