Motorway tolls will increase by 5% in France if a tax on motorway concessions provided for in the 2024 draft budget is implemented, declares Vinci, who threatens to take legal action to win his case. Vinci instead suggests that the State co-finance a highway decarbonization plan.
Raising taxes on motorways is a contradiction, said Pierre Coppey, deputy general director of Vinci and president of Vinci autoroutes, during a presentation to the press on Monday.
It is inevitably less investment at a time when there is a need to do a lot and it is also inevitably an increase in prices which we value today of around 5% taking into account a tax of 4.6% on motorway turnover, he declared during the Vinci Autoroutes Media Days.
So it’s a bad idea
It is therefore a bad idea that we contest and that we will contest by all means if the government does not give up on it or if Parliament persists in voting for this project, he warned. This will play out in the field of administrative justice, constitutional justice and, where appropriate, European justice, but perhaps we will find a solution first, he continued.
According to him, it would be preferable to mobilize all mobility stakeholders in a highway decarbonization project. They are ready for it, that is the appeal that I am making.
The tax on long-distance transport infrastructure decided by Bercy in the name of the ecological transition is supposed to bring in 600 million euros per year from 2024, of which three quarters of the revenue would come from the road sector and a quarter from the air sector, according to the Minister of the Economy Bruno Le Maire.
In terms of decarbonization of highways, Pierre Coppey highlighted numerous needs: multiplication of electric charging points, development of shared modes of transport (carpooling and development of buses) and production of renewable energy along the roads.
Electric charging stations, numbering 3,000 today on the concessioned motorway network (of which Vinci represents 51%), will have to increase to 25,000 for the entire network by 2035, he argued. That’s an investment of 5 billion euros. He also estimated the need for 1000 charging stations for trucks.
Finally, he pointed out that nearly 200 photovoltaic parks should emerge along the highways, which would represent 1 gigawatt of power, the equivalent of a nuclear reactor.
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