The president of SNCF Jean-Pierre Farandou called for the French government to consider a tax on international road haulage to fund transport infrastructure and the development of rail freight. He pointed out how France only gets the negative factors from foreign trucks driving through, such as pollution and road damage.
“Given its geographical position in Europe, between the north and the south, France is a key point of transit. This heavy flow of foreign-registered trucks fills up in Luxembourg. They have huge fuel tanks, – 1,000 litre-capacity – which means there’s no need to fill-up in France. So they don’t pay the local tax on fuel. So surely there is a case for them to make a contribution to supporting French transport infrastructure and finance a non-polluting mode of transport such as rail”, Farandou said on the BFM TV news channel.
HGVs are bypassing Germany to avoid tax
Farandou said the principle of a tax on HGVs already existed with the euro-vignette scheme in Germany. Asked about the reports that a number of foreign trucks were getting around this scheme by crossing into France to avoid German territory so as not to pay the tax, Farandou replied:
“This is exactly what is happening. I’ve been in discussions with elected officials in eastern France who are fed with the impact of many HGVs traversing their region. When you have 40-ton trucks passing through a village that has the misfortune of being in proximity to an A road, one can well imagine the concern of the local population. It simply doesn’t make sense”.
‘Foreign trucks would be targeted’
Asked whether he would make the distinction between trucks in transit, which are foreign-registered and those which have French plates, he said that in his view it is international transit that is causing damage to French transport infrastructure. “I’m not a legal expert and don’t know exactly how far we can go in making a distinction of this kind but in spirit at least, it is the foreign truck that would be targeted.”
France’s Minister of Transport, Philippe Tabarot, recently hinted at a possible eco-tax on trucks to rebalance competition between road haulage and rail freight. He has also pledged support to redirect the proceeds from the country’s network of toll motorways to rail with the aim of modernising infrastructure.