 |
EU transport ministers finally agreed last week the special emissions and noise fees for heavy goods vehicles. But will the revised ‘Eurovignette’ scheme really cut pollution?
On Friday, October 14, EU Transport Ministers meeting in Luxembourg reached a political agreement to impose extra fees on trucks in Europe for air and noise pollution, on top of existing road charges, and in the face of vocal opposition from road haulage groups. |
|
The agreement on the so-called Eurovignette Directive breaks a long-standing deadlock. It revises existing EU rules approved in 1999, extending the 'polluter pays' principle to the road haulage sector, in a bid to encourage greener forms of transport, such as freight by rail. The aim of the new tax is to encourage companies to switch from the roads to more environmentally friendly rail freight while the lorry companies would have an incentive to invest in less-polluting vehicles that would attract lower levies or even exemptions.
The current Eurovignette Directive, adopted in 2006, covers some 15,000km of motorways in the trans-European transport network (TEN), allowing member states to set tolls at levels required to maintain and replace infrastructure. Under the new measures, levies that currently amount to an average 15-25 euro cents per kilometre would increase by 3-4 cents if the agreement is confirmed. “These new rules send the right signals to operators. The aim is to incentivize a shift in behaviour so companies invest in more efficient logistics, less polluting vehicles and more sustainable transport at large,” EU transport commissioner Siim Kallas said in a statement.
In a bid to ease congestion, the directive also allows tolls to be hiked by up to 175% of the normal rate in peak hours, as long as a corresponding reduction is applied in off-peak periods.
The Eurovignette’s provisions concern only 11 EU states - Portugal, Spain, Ireland, France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Greece, with Poland and Hungary expected to join the scheme later. Another EU group - Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden - runs a separate scheme, which is confusingly also called 'Eurovignette,' while others either have national road toll schemes - such as Bulgaria and Romania - or apply to charges at all, like Britain and Finland.
However, the measures have run up against opposition from vehicle manufactures and hauliers, who say they are already taking on huge burdens with existing emission-cutting rules, and with the economic downturn.
Truck manufacturers protested against the measures: the CEO’s of Volvo Group, Fiat's unit Iveco and DAF warned of chaos in an industry employing 250,000 people. "They result from perceptions that trucks are just big cars. This can push regulation in the wrong way," said Volvo Group CEO Leif Johansson. Iveco chief Paolo Monferino said: "Those numbers are scaring us. We don't have the technology to achieve them."
The truckmaking executives said the plan in its current shape would encourage companies to produce more lighter trucks and fewer large ones. As a result, there would be more vehicles on the roads, more congestion and more CO2 emissions. A better measure would be counting CO2 in grammes per tonne of carried freight per km, Iveco’s Monferino said.
The International Road Transport Union (IRU) argued that the plan would impose extra costs on trucks without reducing pollution or congestion. “It is unacceptable that EU Transport Ministers increase the fiscal burden on road freight transport without tabling any solution to reduce externalities as a compensation for removing the mandatory earmarking,” said Alexander Sakkers, President of the IRU Goods Transport Liaison Committee to the EU. “Ministers have also failed to tackle the congestion problem at source, since they foresee charges for road freight transport only although it represents a mere 10% of all road users!”
The European Association for Forwarding, Transport, Logistic and Customs Services (CLECAT), also underlined that the road transport sector was already paying taxes and charges to completely internalize its external costs. CLECAT Secretary General Heiner Rogge said “the current Eurovignette proposal is the typical example of an unsuitable solution for a real problem. It is now perfectly clear that the Eurovignette III is not about decarbonising transport, but about extracting money from road hauliers instead.”
They all hope that the measure will be amended before it becomes law. And there is time: while the agreement by ministers was described as a diplomatic breakthrough, the new rules still have to be agreed by the European Parliament, and any changes voted by the assembly would subsequently have to be endorsed by EU ministers. That means that at least two years are expected to pass before the new Eurovignette is implemented – if at all. |
|
