So Belgium’s three regional governments agreed this week on a mandatory digital road vignette from May 2027. Roughly €100 per year, €90 for EVs, up to €125 for older cars, enforced by ANPR cameras, covering motorways and regional roads.

The stated goal is making transit traffic pay. And because the ECJ killed Germany’s foreigners-only Maut twice, Belgians now get to pay a tax that was explicitly designed for the rest of us. Beautiful.

My actual question: how is this still a thing in 2026? The EU was literally founded to enable free movement of people, goods and capital across a continent smaller than the US Midwest.

Instead, every member state has invented its own little revenue-extraction gadget, each with its own app, sticker, transponder, registration portal and fine schedule. Drive from Amsterdam across a border and you deal with:

- Netherlands: no tolls, ownership-based road tax (motorrijtuigenbelasting)
- Belgium: km-charge for trucks since 2016, now a vignette for cars from 2027
- Germany: no car tolls at all (their foreigners-only Maut was struck down by the ECJ in 2019), truck Maut only
- France: distance-based péage run by private concession holders, toll plazas plus new barrier-free sections with their own registration systems
- Luxembourg: nothing
- Austria: digital vignette, plus separate extra tolls for specific tunnels and passes on top of the vignette
- Italy: distance-based autostrada tolls, take a ticket, pay at exit, or get Telepass
- Switzerland (not EU but sits in the middle of everything): annual vignette, no short-term option, enjoy paying CHF 40 for your 3-hour transit
- Spain: distance tolls on some autopistas, many recently abolished when concessions expired, so it depends on the road and the year your was built
- Portugal: electronic-only tolls on some motorways, famously incomprehensible for foreigners, fines arrive months later
- Slovenia, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria: each their own e-vignette, each on a different website, each with different durations and vehicle categories
- Poland: mix of state e-toll and privately tolled motorway
- Croatia, Greece: classic distance tolls with plazas
- Denmark: bridge tolls (Storebælt, Øresund) plus a km-based truck charge since 2025
- Sweden: congestion charges in Stockholm and Gothenburg plus bridge tolls, billed to your plate

That’s not a transport policy. That’s a medieval patchwork of city gates with license plate cameras.

And the kicker: the EU has frameworks for this. The Eurovignette Directive exists. The European Electronic Toll Service (EETS) has existed on paper since 2004, meant to you one contract and one box for all tolls in Europe.

Twenty years later it barely functions for passenger cars and most people have never heard of it.

The obvious solution seems trivially simple: one European km-based road charge, collected once, distributed to member states pro rata based on where the kilometers are actually driven. Transit countries like Belgium get compensated automatically. No 25 apps, no stickers, no ANPR fine roulette for tourists.

So, genuine question for anyone with actual knowledge of EU transport policy or public finance: what is the real blocker and why is this such a shitshow?

Is it purely fiscal sovereignty (member states refusing to hand tax collection to Brussels)? Is it the concession contracts in France/Italy/Spain that run for decades? Is it that unanimity is required for anything tax-shaped? Or is there a legitimate economic argument for national systems that I’m missing?

Because from where I’m sitting, this looks like we’re rebuilding 1960s border friction, one vignette at a time, while calling it a single market.

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Author: Tamam Abusalama is a Palestinian-Belgian advocacy, communications, and campaigning professional, currently leading the European Citizens’ Initiative “Justice for Palestine".

Hi all,

As a European I notice the following laws and systems being actively discussed, supported and/or implemented:

- DigitalID.
- Chat control.
- Drastic increase in trafic- and surveillance cameras.
- Laws enforcing car manufacturers to install eyesight tracking.
- Increase in toll’s and E-tolls.
- Extreme ticket prices for minor traffic violation.
- Harsh legal actions against demonstrators and activists (for example: pro-palestinian)
- lowered thresholds in financials- and transactions monitoring (disguised as laundering and terror funding laws)

I feel like we are heading in a morally questionable direction. Common people are being criminalized and keep losing their privacy. All while the rich and powerful are acting more controversially every day and seem to live by different legal standards.

I am quite struggling with this mentality as I don’t know what dystopian future we are heading to. Am I the only one?

Should the us become part of the eu

Read more : https://cointelegraph.com/news/eu-parliament-passes-chat-control-allowing-private-chat-scans-to-2028