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

  • Metro Pacific pushes for Cebu-Mactan bridge in the Philippines
    January 19, 2015
    Metro Pacific Investments Corp (MPIC) is in discussions to form a joint venture for construction of a toll bridge connecting the islands of Mactan and Cebu in the Philippines. Cebu is an island province that incorporates 167 surrounding islands and islets, one of them being Mactan, which lies immediately off Cebu Island, across from Cebu City. MPIC’s subsidiary, Metro Pacific Tollways Development Corp (MPTDC), is proposing an 8.3km bridge costing around US$380 million, according to local media reports
  • Milan wins prestigious ITF transport award for its urban road pricing scheme
    May 20, 2014
    The Italian city of Milan has won the 2014 Transport Achievement Award (TAA) for its ‘Area C’ urban road pricing scheme. The TAA is awarded annually by the International Transport Forum (ITF) at the OECD, an intergovernmental organisation for the transport sector with 54 member countries. The award will be presented tomorrow in the presence of ministers from around the world during the opening plenary of their global transport summit organised by the ITF. Milan, said by the ITF to be one of the most c
  • Road pricing revenue a source of investment funds
    February 16, 2012
    When channelled back into the road sector, revenue from road charging is seen by many as a source of additional investment and research funds as Patrick Smith reports. Late in 2010, three major European organisations put out a policy statement calling for fair charging for greener, smarter and safer road infrastructure. ASECAP (the European toll road operators organisation); ERF (European Road Federation) and the IRU (International Road Transport Union), said that in recent years the concept of road chargin
  • America: on the brink of better road asset management
    February 23, 2015
    It’s make or break time for highways maintenance in the United States, according to Greg Cohen, head of the American Highways Users’ Alliance, speaking at the Pavement Preservation and Recycling Summit in Paris today. What happens in the next year will make the difference between a decade of continuing crumbling road infrastructure or a renaissance in America’s highways, he told delegates attending the first day’s afternoon plenary session. All state governments must submit a road asset management plan to t