Germany to privatise highways
- Thread starter Tahuti
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schlaufuchs
Break My Heart
Can you post the German anyway?
News today is that the EU and Germany have reached an agreement. 10 day vignettes will start at €2.50 (for clean cars). The toll is supposed to operate both on the Autobahn and on the Bundesstrasse. The Netherlands and Austria are intending to sue, and some local SPD politicians seem unhappy. I believe Die Linke and the Greens are also opposed. Actual implementation will only start after the elections, so there's a decent chance nothing will happen since it is not clear there'll be a majority for this after the election. I'm also not sure how important this will be for the CSU after the election.
At a rate of €2.50, it's not clear the entire thing can be operated on a profit, especially knowing the mind-blowing efficiency of the German government.
At a rate of €2.50, it's not clear the entire thing can be operated on a profit, especially knowing the mind-blowing efficiency of the German government.
Terxpahseyton
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Tagesschau
innonimatu
the resident Cassandra
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Isn't the infrastructure of mass transit subsidized also?
Yes, but in different ways. Mass transit is directly subsidized, but fare recapture is actually fairly high, many places recapture more than 3/4, on the other hand it substantially reduces pollution and congestion. Automobiles produce substantial amounts of pollution that isn't accurately priced into their cost, they also beget sprawl which doesn't pay for itself necessitating injections of cash from state and federal levels to keep it alive. There are also the national security implications of building over farmland necessitating more food imported.
On what grounds exactly would Austria sue considering they impose their own damn vignettes?
the reason for suing is that Germany has made it clear that its domestic drivers will have the cost of the toll reduced from their car registration tax making sure they will not pay more than before. so that only other EU nationals will in fact pay the toll which would be discrimination of non-German EU citizens. The EU commission now accepts that this is not the case if at least some of the tax rebate given to German drivers (owners of cars meeting the newest emission criteria) exceeds the toll costs and thus the rebate is not a one-to-one exchange for the toll costs. Then the Rebate and the Toll are entirely unrelated things and fine to go. Our neighbors for some reason do not buy that reasoning...
Seems like the European Commission is meddling excessively. If Germany wants to create a vignette or toll system it can, and if it wants to cut taxes somewhere else that's also their prerogative. Considering Austria makes you pay ten euro just to cross the border, they can suck it.
FriendlyFire
Codex WMDicanious
Never let hypocrisy get in the way of a good law suit!
1. It's very much not happening (and very few people ever considered that probable in any way).
2. Both the idea being fielded and it's complete and permanent defeat has to be understood with the in the context of federal structure renegotiations happening at the same time.
3. Those have now concluded. TL;DR:
- The Länderfinanzausgleich is dead (no more rich, conservative states paying for them punks in Berlin and Bremen... and kinda everybody).
- The Federal level is picking up the tab, replacing the payments the poor states (i.e. most states) previously recieved.
- Huge-butt federal power-grab. They tend to do that when they have to give people free feces.
- Since killing the state-to-state transfers has been a wet dream for conservative states since the early 90s, it was politically sensible and feasable to tell them to shove it with all their crazy Autobahn nonsense.
@Owen:
http://www.tagesschau.de/inland/bund-laender-finanzpakt-hintergrund-101.html
In case you, you know, care:
No, Merkel does not and has never had the necessary majorities for this.
It's a Consensus Republic thing.
You know, like our Constitutional Court, that looks pretty much exactly like The West Wing's utopian fantasy.
Erm, both rents and groceries in the FRG are insanely cheap in international comparison.
Munich and Hamburg are still quite cheap compared to similarly attractive Scandinavian or Anglospherian cities.
It's the principle of the thing.
You know, since we don't have US gun culture (or the insane levels of inequality of Brazil), we have to obsess about Freedom!!11 in other ways.
I.e. there can't be tolls. Well, that, and when they put the ID-check-thingies in cigarette vending machines plenty of people though of that as us seriously drifting towards dystopian authoritarianism.
Well, the toll might still happen.
It's pretty much an electoral loser for Merkel - and a winner for the CSU.
Which makes it, well, possible. But i largely think about it as one of those things that gets written into coalition contracts and then totally, seriously, for reals, allmost happens for a long time...
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