Algarve motorway tolls

[Peter Highe]

Hi

You may know that tomorrow, the A22 along the Algarve becomes an electronic toll road. We are now proudly renting a motorway transponder for the A22 and any other electronic toll road in Portugal. It took us three attempts at three different post offices, at the main post office in Porto, at Praia da Luz and in Sagres. We finally were successful at the small post office in Sagres at the extreme western end of the Algarve, where we were served very competently by the manager, M Gomez. Actually, there didn’t appear to be any other staff and Sagres is not a very big place, so I guess he was pretty good at dealing with the myriad problems presented every day – he certainly sorted out the attempt at queue jumping.

If you are a visitor to Portugal and have a foreign registered vehicle you have one way of dealing with the electronic tolls, you pay €27.50 deposit, and the first 10€ tolls, for a little plastic box which you stick on the windscreen behind the rear view mirror (or in our case where it would be if we had one) and as much as you like, above 10€, to charge it up. We bought another €15 worth of credit (are you still with me, that’s €25 toll credit.) It costs, said M Gomez, €20.50 to travel the length of the motorway from the western end to the Spanish border.

The temporary permit lasts for three months, and then expires. As we understand it, it can be topped up at any post office during this time, but you need the reference number from the receipt and M Gomez wrote this out for us in Biro because, he said the ‘heat sensitive printer ink would fade’. Once the permit expires, the box can be taken into a post office for a refund and another one (or maybe the same one, brought back to life) hired for the same price.

We have attached the plastic box to the windscreen, carefully kept the metre or so of printout from the post office and we wait to see if it protects us from the threatened (up to €600) fines.

Whatever you may think of UK politics, it has to make you wince about how Portugal is going about this. They are having to do it against massive opposition, knowing that people will avoid the motorway, and that there will be an enormous increase in the number of accidents on the N125, and that the kit on the motorway has been installed for months and left idle. The government also offer introductory discounts to local residents, but it is still unsure whether the system can recognise foreign number plates or whether there is any system in place to charge foreign drivers if they aren’t as inherently law abiding as us!

 

P&L

 

[Guest Peter James]

If they can't contact you till you got home it would be interesting to see how they would prove a box was not fitted?

Or that it was not obstructed in some way to prevent your balance being debited as you drove past?

[Peter Highe]

Hi

 

It is by no means clear that they can contact you at home, since there is some doubt as to whether they have the connections to, say, the DVLA in the UK. However if two large GNR officers with guns were to stop you to check...

 

Peter