Warsaw/Vienna, July 10, 2012 – For a year now, tolls for trucks and heavy passenger cars have been collected on Poland’s highways and expressways and replaced the old, unprofitable vignette system
Thanks to the new system, within the first year the Polish government has been able to collect, with a 99.9 percent accuracy, tolls amounting to over EUR 178 million. This means the income by the end of the year will most likely outdo the costs of setting up the project.
"Major infrastructure projects don’t usually turn a profit during the first few years. In this case the project investments for Poland will most likely have amortized after the first 18 months," explains Marek Cywiński, CEO of Kapsch Telematic Services Poland. "The European Commission is naming the system implemented in Poland as a benchmark in all its current publications. It is a very good system, driver-friendly and exact. There is no better evaluation," says Lech Witecki, General Director for National Roads and Motorways. GDDKiA is the central authority of the government of Poland for the administration of the national roads and motorways.
On July 1, 2012 the toll system was expanded by 320 km and now covers a network of 1890 km. Additional stretches will follow starting in 2013.
Positive effect on the environment
In addition to the economic effects, the new toll system in Poland has also been friendly to the environment. Because vehicles with the strictest emissions standards (Euro 5 and Euro 6) pay the lowest toll, domestic businesses have updated their vehicle fleets and international corporations are sending modern vehicles through Poland. The figures in parenthesis are the levels collected six months ago:
-
Euro 6 – 0.23% (0.20%)
-
Euro 5 – 26.70% (23%)
-
Euro 4 – 14.89% (14%)
-
Euro 3 – 31.54% (33%)
-
Euro 2 – 17.47% (20%)
-
Euro 1 – 3.55% (4%)
-
Euro 0 – 5.58% (5.8%)
Kapsch TrafficCom is a provider of high-performance intelligent transportation systems (ITS) in the application fields of toll collection, urban access management and traffic safety and security. Kapsch TrafficCom covers the entire value creation chain of its customers as a one-stop shop by providing products and components as well as subsystems as open market products, by integrating them into turnkey systems or by developing end-to-end solutions, including services for the technical and commercial operations of systems. Within its current core business of electronic toll collection (ETC), Kapsch TrafficCom designs, builds and operates ETC systems, in particular for multi-lane free-flow traffic. With 280 references in 41 countries on all five continents and with almost 70 million on-board units delivered and about 18,000 lanes equipped, Kapsch TrafficCom has positioned itself among the internationally recognized suppliers of electronic toll collection worldwide. Kapsch TrafficCom is headquartered in Vienna, Austria, and has subsidiaries and representative offices in 30 countries.
Follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/kapschnet