At every toll booth, you are not paying for a road. You are paying a rent.

At every toll booth, you are not paying for a road. You are paying a rent. And the State organized it.

Did you know?

You take the motorway to go on holiday, to go to work, to see your family. You pay. A lot. More and more. And you are right to feel that something is wrong.

Here are the figures, the sources, and the name of the scandal: the 2006 privatization of the motorways.

Let us return to the story in its cold accounting truth. In 2006, the government led by Dominique de Villepin decided to privatize the historic motorway concession companies, officially in order to reduce State debt. The sale of public shares brought €16.5 billion into the Treasury. Source: the Senate Finance Committee, the Delahaye report, and the IGF-CGEDD report of February 2021.

Sixteen and a half billion. Remember that figure carefully, because here is what it really cost the nation.

The dividends paid to shareholders of the four main motorway companies are expected to reach €76 billion by 2036. That is about five times the price at which the State sold these infrastructures in 2006. Source: the Senate inquiry committee, confirmed in April 2025 by Public Sénat. Read that again.

The State sold for €16.5 billion an asset that will pay €76 billion in dividends to its private purchasers. It sold the hen and now watches others collect the golden eggs — eggs paid for by you at every toll passage.

And that is not all. The 2020 Senate inquiry committee established several facts that should provoke national anger. The companies had already made an estimated €24 billion in net profit between 2006 and 2019. Their profitability was abnormally high for low-risk infrastructure. Their debt had been largely transferred to the concession companies themselves. In plain language: the State sold a strategic asset too cheaply, the buyers financed part of the operation through the asset itself, and the user has been paying the bill ever since.

The toll formula: a locked-in rent

The motorway contracts provide for automatic tariff increases. The basic formula guarantees toll increases equal to at least 70% of inflation. But that is a floor, not a ceiling. And that is where the problem lies. Every five years, the State signs plan contracts with the companies: they commit to financing works, and in exchange the State grants additional increases beyond the 70% of inflation. The formula then becomes 70% of inflation plus an additional percentage.

The concrete result is that between 2000 and 2006, tolls rose by an average of 2.06% per year, for inflation of 1.63%. Tariffs therefore rise structurally faster than the cost of living.

The real problem, identified by the Court of Auditors as early as 2008, is opacity and proliferation: a game played on the distribution of increases between sections that allows higher rises where traffic is densest. A users’ committee, created in 2009, was not even consulted when contracts were renewed.

In plain terms: the State validates everything. Therefore the State is responsible.

It is no longer our role to remain spectators of decline.