Cars will be able to pass without stopping at the toll at the end of 2024 on the A13 and A14 motorways connecting Paris to Normandy, because their passage will be detected by sensors on gantries, the Sanef motorway company said on Wednesday. Users will be able to travel at the authorized speed on the motorway without slowing down or stopping by passing under the gates equipped with cameras and sensors that will identify the vehicles, described the Société des autoroutes du nord et de l’Est de France. (Sanef) in a press release.
Their account will be automatically debited if they subscribe to electronic toll payment. If they are not, they can either register their license plate on the Sanef website or application, or pay after their passage by phone, online or at a physical terminal. Sanef promises “time savings, fuel savings and reductions in CO2 emissions into the atmosphere”. It is currently necessary to stop four times at the toll between Paris and Deauville and five times between Paris and Caen on the A13, whose weekend traffic jams are legendary.
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The work will then continue until 2027 with the destruction of the current toll barriers, of which part of the spaces – 28 hectares, or the equivalent of 40 football fields, according to the company – will be returned to nature. The investment is valued at around 120 million euros, a quarter of which will be covered by an annual tariff increase of 0.22% for three years, from February 1, 2022.
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Sanef has been experimenting with this formula since March 2019 at the Boulay-Moselle interchange on the A4 motorway. “The technological system has demonstrated its reliability and customers have become familiar with this new payment system,” she says. This system called “free-flow” – or “free flow” in French – is already widely used abroad (South Africa, Chile, Great Britain, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, etc.), in particular by the Spanish group Abertis, parent company of Sanef. A similar device must be adopted on the future A79 motorway, built by Eiffage, which is due to open in the Allier in the fall of 2022.
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