For Whom The Bell Tolls

For nearly two years now I have travelled up and down the A5 motorway between Cascais and Lisboa. Most often I get off at the Carcavelos exit and pass through the toll, costing me 75 cents. Other times I will need to go all the way to Lisboa and pay €1,35. Of course, this is not a problem. It has become part of my daily routine that I make certain to always have a few euros of loose change hanging around in the drinks holder of the car to pay the tolls with. The only real downside is that my wallet tends to get bogged down with an abundance of tiny 1 and 2 cent coins that the toll booths don't accept!

For the most part, that is the extent of the whole "toll road" business on my life. There are occasions when I travel further afield than the A5 and cross the bridge into the Alentejo or, like I did last weekend, travel north up one of the larger motorways stretching the length of Portugal. For these longer motorways, the toll system is slightly different. Upon joining the motorway the first booth prints you a ticket which you must surrender when exiting the motorway where it is used to calculate your fee. You pay the fee, either into the machine or, if there is one present, to the person in the booth, at which point you are allowed to pass.

Thus far, paying tolls is easy. You drive and when you reach a booth, you pay. Or you take a ticket and pay at the next booth. Simple. But then, for some reason, someone somewhere decided to make a simple thing complicated. They created a different system. And quite frankly it's a big pain in the bum. The idea sounds simple enough. There are no booths or people paid to sit in them all day long collecting money. No tickets or pay machines. Only cameras mounted on steel gantries over the road. When you pass underneath a photo is taken of your registration plate and some computer magic happens to figure out which motorway you've driven along and how much you ought to pay. And that part works, which is great. It's the paying part that doesn't work. In a country that has a comprehensively integrated and highly successful ATM banking system, where you can pay any bill and conduct any type of financial transaction with ease, you'd think they have it nailed. Nope. For some inexplicable reason paying these tolls is not linked into the ATM "Multibanco" system. No. Here is what you have to do. You have to wait for 48 hours for the information to be processed, and then, and only then, do you have 5 days in which to visit a post office with your car registration number and pay the required fee over the counter. Fail to pay it within the five days and the toll gets passed back to the toll company who multiplies the amount into a fine. Ironically, the fine you can pay through the Multibanco network. So why make a simple system overly complicated? Why create a new system when there is already one in place that works? A true skeptic will, without hesitation, suggest that it is intentionally difficult so that lots of people have to pay the exaggerated extra cost of the fine. However, as anyone who lives in Portugal will undoubtedly know, the issues concerning this "Electronic Only" toll system are a lot more complicated than that. On the A22 motorway in the Algarve the installation of this type of toll (which happened I believe in Dec 2011) has induced such a feeling of resentment and anger that people have rallied together in protest of the insanity of it all. The ramifications of making this road into a toll road are well known and widespread among the residents of the Algarve, but suffice to say that a quick Google of "A22 tolls Portugal" will reveal an absolute torrent of information about it.

As far as I am concerned, I am not opposed to paying the tolls. Like many people living close to the A22, what I object to is the payment system. When I drove up to Barcelos to watch the footie recently I was very careful to avoid any of these roads with the electronic tolls, however, on the return journey I missed to turn to avoid them and therefore necessitated an inconvenient trip to the Post Office. Well, to be honest, it was that inconvenient, the queue wasn't too long and it did force me into speaking a little Portuguese, which is always good. But if I had to take an hour out of my life every single week just to stand in line at the Post Office? Now that would be a drag.

Fortunately there is another system in place. Yeah, I know. Another system! How complicated do they need to make the whole 'toll road experience' anyway? But hold on a minute. This one is good. It's called "Via Verde" and it allows you to use the special "non stop" lanes at toll booths. After visiting the post office to pay the €2 toll (or more precisely, €2,32 including the Post Office's cut!) that I incurred on the A28 near Barcelos, I decided that enough was enough and that I would get myself down to the Via Verde office and buy one of their gadgets for my car so that I can use these Via Verde lanes. All the tolls in Portugal have these lanes and it even works on the "Electronic Only" roads like the A22. The idea is that you have one of these little boxes, called a transponder, stuck behind your rear view mirror and each time you pass through a toll an LCD screen lights up in green to tell you how much you owe and it is recorded. At the end of the month the Via Verde computers add up your accumulated toll fees and the correct amount subtracted from your bank account.

So, a couple of days ago I drove down to the Via Verde office. I parked up, went inside, took a ticket and dutifully sat down with my book to wait for my number to come up on the plasma screen. It cost me €25 for the transponder and an extra €10 was fleeced from my wallet to have it activated right away, but I can't complain really. I can now drive on any toll road in Portugal and never have to worry about stopping at a pay machine without the correct change, or popping down to join the queue in the Post Office on a Wednesday lunchtime. It pays to follow the Green Way.