Trucks are planned to be taxed with a new road tax
The amount of the tax will depend on the distance traveled and will be from UAH 1 to UAH 3, depending on the weight of the vehicle.
The Cabinet of Ministers has registered a draft law in the Verkhovna Rada, which provides for a fine for non-payment of a new, as yet non-existent road tax from trucks.
Draft Law 2557-IX dated 06.09.2022 establishes liability for non-payment of tolls for the use of public highways. It provides for the addition of part 3 of Article 132 of the Code of Administrative Offenses: ‘Driving a truck weighing more than 12 tons without a device that ensures the transmission of information about road use entails a fine for the driver in the amount of 500 n.m.d.y. (8500 hryvnias)’.
In the explanatory note to the draft law, the government writes that ‘about 9.2 million vehicles are registered in Ukraine, of which 1.5 million are trucks, excluding trucks with foreign registration.
At the same time, the wear and tear of the road surface during operation, caused by trucks, is much greater than from the passage of passenger cars (according to the calculations of foreign experts, the difference is up to 50 thousand times, depending on the level of load). The existing system of taxation and fees in Ukraine does not take this factor into account.
The Cabinet of Ministers claims that almost all European countries have already introduced truck tolls: the Czech Republic, Poland, Turkey, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Spain, Portugal, Austria, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Switzerland, France, Slovakia, Hungary, Latvia and others The amount of tolls in European countries varies from UAH 2.2 to UAH 11 per kilometer, depending on the total weight of the vehicle, axle load, road class, fuel type, noise level, even travel time, etc.
In order to control how much the truck has traveled on the roads of a particular country, a special device is installed on it. This draft law proposes to impose a fine precisely for the absence of such a device in the car.
A device that measures truck mileage in Belarus
At the same time, there are no other projects that will regulate the introduction of the new tax. It is only known that the government wants to send the collected funds to repair roads and receive up to UAH 9 billion. for a year. At the same time, the road tariff is expected to be set at the level of UAH 1.0 – 3.0. for each kilometer of roads that the truck traveled on the roads of Ukraine.
It is not known whether this tax must be paid by the owners of all trucks, including those registered in Ukraine, or only foreign ones.
