Bulgaria road agency denies problem with system for selling electronic road vignettes
The Bulgarian Road Infrastructure Agency issued a denial on January 2 of media reports that “in many places” the system for selling the newly-introduced electronic road tax “vignettes” was not working.
Television station bTV quoted viewers as reporting complaints about the system. One said that he had travelled to seven or eight fuel stations without being able to purchase the road tax sticker.
In a statement on its website, the Road Infrastructure Agency denied bTV’s report.
“Today, no technical problems have been identified on bgtoll.com,” the agency, referring to the website where the electronic road vignettes are sold.
A self-service terminal depicted as not working was a “local case, not a general conclusion,” the agency said.
It said that on January 1 2019, more than 5000 were sold, for about 380 000 leva.
“This means that a vignette was about every 20 seconds,” Road Infrastructure Agency head Svetoslav Glosov said.
Since the launch of sales of electronic vignettes for 2019 on December 17 2018, revenue from sales was about 1.5 million leva.
Glosov said that an e-vignette can be bought via self-service terminals, the mobile app, the bgtoll.bg website or at retail sales points, mainly at fuel stations next to motorways.
He said that a detailed map was to be drawn up showing the routes on Bulgaria’s roads for which an e-vignette is required.
The bgtoll.bg website has versions, apart from in Bulgarian, in English, German, Serbian, Turkish, Russian, Romanian and Greek.
A check on the mid-afternoon of January 2 found that when clicking on “buy an e-vignette” in English and all the other foreign languages, the user was taken through to the version in the Bulgarian language.
(Photo: Bulgaria Road Infrastructure Agency)
