Skip to main content

Switzerland increases fuel tax to create road maintenance fund

The Swiss government has created a fund for street and urban transport works to help ease what it says will be a deficit of around €1.26 billion each year up to by 2030. The fund will be created from a rise in road fuel tax from €0.27 to €0.33. Added money will come from a tax on electric vehicles due to start in 2020 and which will raise around €84 million a year, rising to around €275 million. The road maintenance fund also will receive around €366 million from taxes on imported cars and €320 mil
September 21, 2015 Read time: 2 mins
The Swiss government has created a fund for street and urban transport works to help ease what it says will be a deficit of around €1.26 billion each year up to by 2030.

The fund will be created from a rise in road fuel tax from €0.27 to €0.33.

Added money will come from a tax on electric vehicles due to start in 2020 and which will raise around €84 million a year, rising to around €275 million.

The road maintenance fund also will receive around €366 million from taxes on imported cars and €320 million from highway tolls.

Transport Minister Doris Leuthard set the stage for a tax hike when she announced the plans in February last year. She said at the time that traffic on Swiss roads has doubled since 1990 meaning Switzerland’s roads were wearing out that much faster.

At the time, the two transport associations TCS and ACS as well as the Swiss Road Transport Federation (ASTAG) welcomed Leuthard’s creation of the road fund but rejected the tax hike, according to a report by the Swiss English language newspaper The Local.

In a referendum in November 2013 the Swiss rejected government plans to increase the cost of a motorway tax disc to 100 francs from the current 40 as part of plans to pay for more road works.

Related Content

  • US DOTs in critical funding battle
    February 9, 2012
    In the US, state DOTs are preparing for the upcoming reauthorisation battle in a tough economic and political climate. Set to expire by the end of the year, the bill is a critical funding source for many transportation projects in the US. However transportation officials in the US are facing a tough battle as the political and economic climate has changed considerably since the last reauthorisation was passed, shortly after President Obama's inauguration in January 2009. Since then, the recession has contin
  • UK: cash released for pothole repairs
    February 16, 2021
    UK’s Department of Transport said it takes around £50 (€57 / $69) to fix a pothole.
  • Call for new ways of funding road infrastructure
    February 16, 2012
    In the first of a two-part article, Jack Opiola, a prominent global expert on transport policy and a leading member of IRF Geneva's Policy Committee on ITS, introduces the urgent need to develop new, more equitable revenue mechanisms to replace fuel taxes as a means of funding and maintaining road infrastructure
  • ACE/AECOM report: private sector and user-pay for English roads
    May 14, 2018
    It’s one minute to midnight for funding England’s roads, according to a timely new report, and the clock’s big hand is pointing to some form of user-pay solution, reports David Arminas Is there any way out of future user-pay funding for England’s highway infrastructure? The answer is a resounding ‘no’, according to the recently published report: Funding Roads for the Future. The brief 25-page document by the London-based Association for Consultancy and Engineering, ACE**, sums up the state of England’s ro