I’m feeling tolls deserve a blog on their own.  In many countries you have to pay tolls when on the motorways, bridges or tunnels.

There are three main ways of paying tolls.

• Online payment with number plate recognition

UK, Ireland and Italy do it all automatically on number plate recognition.  You either have to know to go online beforehand and pay, or realise that the signs are saying pay online and then remember in the website address you just whizzed under until later when you are no longer driving.  Not the best method for a foreigner

• Vignette and little boxes.

You have to buy these from somewhere.  I’m sure these are straightforward if you know what you are doing. It tends to be vignettes if you are a car and boxes if you are bigger. 

 In Austria you have to buy the box before you arrive, so from a service station in Germany for us.  It was all straight forward , until it came to the euro emissions class.  You have to send your V5 in once you have bought the box to prove you are the class you stated you were. No problem, apart from our V5 doesn’t have the euro class on it.  So we have to get a certificate of conformity from somewhere, the original manufacturer’s I believe.  After failing to get a certificate of conformity,  we decided to change our euro class to the worst, you pay the top amount and therefore don’t have anything to prove.  I’m still not sure what happens about the kilometres we paid at the lower amount.  We are going to have to stop and ask when we get back into Austria as the box people aren’t replying to our emails.

The Slovenian one proved worse.  It wasn’t clear where you get the boxes, but as you cross the boarder there was a building that said sales point.  So we pulled up and went to buy a box. We were directed to a toll window slightly further down the road.  So we took Bertie, joined the queue of cars and was eventually told not here, at the next service station.  At the next service station we did manage to buy one. It took a long time and nearly everyone was buying boxes.  I felt sorry for those just picking up a coffee, the queue was half way around the building.  We set off, under the first gantry we got the expected ping, until the 4th gantry when the box gave two pings.  So we stopped at the next service station.  They said it was set to the wrong number of axles, which it wasn’t.  We set off again.  1.5 hours it has taken us to drive about 30K.    Next gantry we get the double ping again.  We drive on and ignore it.  (This was a journey where later the van started going into limp home mode and we had to stop a further twice due to that).  When we were at our site we signed up to the portal and found the double ping was because we had less than €25 left on it.

• Toll booths

You stop at the toll booth as you join the toll road you take a ticket.  You stop at the toll booth when you leave the toll road and present your credit card.  It’s quick and easy and very simple as a foreigner, you can’t miss it, you can’t set the box to the wrong thing, you can’t forget.

I’m sure that if you are a local doing the tolls day in and day out then the automated systems work like a dream once   you have set them up, but as a foreigner they cause what seems like an endless set of small issues.