We will soon be able to go through the toll… without stopping! The motorway company Sanef announced, this Wednesday, the establishment at the end of 2024, on the A13 and A14 motorways linking Paris to Normandy, of barrier-free tolls. The passage of vehicles will be detected by sensors on gates. The device should make it possible to reduce traffic jams and leave room for nature.

Users will be able to travel at the authorized speed on the motorway without slowing down or stopping while passing under the gantries equipped with cameras and sensors which will identify the vehicles, described the Company of the motorways of the north and the east of France. (Sanef) in a press release. Their account will be automatically debited if they subscribe to electronic toll. If they are not, they can either register their license plate on the Sanef website or application, or pay after their passage by telephone, online or at a physical terminal.

Sanef promises “time savings, fuel savings and reductions in CO2 emissions into the atmosphere”. You currently have to stop four times at the toll between Paris and Deauville and five times between Paris and Caen on the A13, whose weekend return traffic jams are legendary.

A system widely used abroad

The work will then continue until 2027 with the destruction of the current toll gates, part of which – 28 hectares, the equivalent of 40 football pitches, according to the company – will be returned to nature. The investment is valued at around 120 million euros, a quarter of which will be covered by an annual rate increase of 0.22% for three years, from February 1, 2022.

Sanef has been experimenting with this formula since March 2019 at the Boulay-Moselle interchange on the A4 motorway. "The technological system has demonstrated its reliability and customers have become familiar with this new payment system," she says. This system, called “free-flow” – or “free flow” in French – is already widely used abroad (South Africa, Chile, Great Britain, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, etc.), in particular by the group Spanish Abertis, parent company of Sanef.

A similar device must be adopted on the future A79 motorway, built by Eiffage, which must open in the Allier in the fall of 2022.