Road tolls on motorbikes will end

Recently, the Ministry of Transport submitted to the Government a proposal to temporarily stop collecting road fees for motorbikes for further research, but the direction is to completely eliminate them.

On the afternoon of October 13, at the press conference of the Ministry of Transport, Deputy Minister of Transport Nguyen Hong Truong provided more information on this issue.

According to Deputy Minister Truong, when introducing the road toll collection regime for motorbikes, the Ministry of Transport also widely consulted the people, including the regulation: All the money collected through road tolls for motorbikes will be left for localities to maintain and repair local roads. Because before, we also collected motorbike tolls at toll stations, but this practice has ended due to increased traffic congestion.

Deputy Minister Truong also affirmed that the road toll collection for motorbikes is not because these vehicles cause damage to the roads. Through toll collection, we want to mobilize people to use their vehicles to contribute their small efforts to the country to upgrade and repair roads.

The Ministry of Transport said it will end road tolls on motorbikes.

(Photo: KT)

According to Deputy Minister Nguyen Hong Truong's calculations, at the time of the plan to collect road fees for motorbikes, the whole country had 30 million motorbikes, and now this number has increased to 45 million. While road fees collected by cars each year are only 4,500 billion VND, if collected correctly and fully with an average of 70,000 VND/vehicle/year, each year the whole country will have over 3,000 billion VND collected through motorbikes. "This is not a small number, contributing greatly to the process of repairing local roads," said Deputy Minister Nguyen Hong Truong.

However, according to Deputy Minister Nguyen Hong Truong, in the process of collecting road fees for motorbikes, there are no sanctions, so when implementing the fee collection, with the motto of bringing it to communes and wards for combined collection, but in reality, some people pay, some do not.

Meanwhile, due to the lack of sanctions, there are people who comply but then do not comply and cannot be handled, along with many other problems. This leads to the number of localities reporting that they only collect 15% - 20% and gradually decreasing over the years, the revenue is not enough to cover the expenses of those who collect on their behalf.

“Stopping toll collection also meets the wishes of the majority of people. The Ministry of Transport also affirmed that when stopping toll collection for motorbikes, localities without revenue will have to balance their own capital to maintain local roads. The Ministry of Transport recently submitted to the Government a proposal to temporarily stop toll collection for motorbikes for further study, but the direction is to completely stop it, because if sanctions are imposed, localities still believe that the increasing average income per capita will compensate for this fee, while cars will still be charged fees,” said Deputy Minister Nguyen Hong Truong.

It is known that in the 3 years of implementing road toll collection for motorbikes, the amount of money collected was not much. In 2013-2014, the whole country collected over 550 billion VND each year, in the first half of 2015, it collected nearly 175 billion VND./.

According to VOV.VN