Drivers who have managed to pay tolls for travel on the Algarve’s Via do Infante will not be best pleased to read that those who did not bother to pay, or found the system too complicated to pay within the allotted period, are to qualify for large discounts.
The formerly free SCUT roads in Portugal, including the Algarve's A22-Via do Infante, were deemed illegal by the European Commission in 2011, yet the government continues to allow authoirsed companies to collect money from drivers, and applies the full force of the state's coercive collection system to non-payers despite toll companies not being government bodies.
This use of the state's collection system has been deemed illegal by the Portuguese courts yet by skipping any need to go to court to recover monies owed, the concession holders have the power and nastiness of the state collection system at their full disposal.
Drivers who have run up debts prior to April 30, 2015 now can pay off the money owed with discounts as long as they clear the debts by the end of September, 2015.
This is an exceptional process and was published in the Official Gazette on Monday, having been approved in parliament in March.
Payments can be made on the Finanças website with debtors paying toll and related administrative costs before the end of September benefitting from an interest waiver and a halving of the execution procedure costs. As for the fines, drivers will benefit from 10% reduction, which can never be less than €5.
Despite the general taxpayer shelling out for subsidies year after year for the Via do Infante, the government refuses to produce the long-promised report on the impact tolls have had on the Algarve’s fragile, seasonal economy.
This delibearte sloth leads anti-tolls group CUVI to conclude that such a report clearly would demonstrate that the economic damage to the region has been far in excess of the money collected by the Spanish-owned concession holder.
The tolls system has been debated in parliament several times and always with the same party line vote that the tolls should stay, using the catchy mantra ‘user pays.’
The problem with the Via do Infante is that the user pays, and then the general taxpayer pays again to subsidise the toll operator for an entirely predictable drop in traffic volume since the system was introduced.
While many Via do Infante users do pay their toll fees, local businesses also have paid with closure and increased unemployment. With increased distribution costs, the consumer also has been forced to subsidise the toll system on a road that was ¾ funded with EC money to improve the Algarve's regional economy through easier access and lower transport costs.
The impact on the integrity of the parallel road, the EN125, has been dire with the promised upgrade and reconstruction works cynically shelved by the government just after the tolls were introduced.
This volte face at least has caused some delayed adverse reaction from the Algarve’s mayors, many of whom had been persuaded to back the tolls scheme in return for upgrade work on the EN125 in their areas.
The accident rate on the EN125 has risen due to the volume of traffic and inevitably those accidents resulting in deaths have received wide coverage in an unsuccessful attempt to get the government to reconsider.
If the treasury produced a figure needed to buy the taxpayer out of the Algarve tolls contract, heads would roll as the high guaranteed traffic volume figure coupled with a 20 year + contract period adds up to hundreds of millions of euros at a time when the government is unable to feed its increasing number of poor and homeless.
This Catch22 has been avoided by the Passos Coelho administration which continues to insists the tolls are a very good idea, not because they produce any revenue for the treasury or benefits to the regional economy, but because to undo the contract would be politically dangerous.
