A69 motorway: up to 20.40 euros for a round trip between Toulouse and Castres, toll prices make people cringe

Twenty euros to save around twenty minutes on the road? The bill risks deterring more than one person. Thursday October 8, the Atosca concessionaire unveiled the toll prices for the future A69 motorway, which should connect Toulouse to Castres from this Friday November 6.

To make this journey, motorists driving a thermal vehicle will have to pay 10.20 euros for a one-way ticket, or 20.40 euros for a round trip. In detail, the 53 kilometer journey between Verfeil and Castres will cost 8.50 euros, to which will be added 1.70 euros to reach Toulouse by the A680. Eligible ultra-low emission vehicles will benefit from a reduced rate on the A69.

This new connection should make it possible to shorten by around twenty minutes a journey which currently takes almost an hour and a half. Barely announced, these prices made people cringe. “I don’t see the point in spending so much money to save so little time.

What will it be? Maybe a quarter of an hour, twenty minutes? », protests Michelle, interviewed by ICI Occitanie in the parking lot of a supermarket.

Same observation for Martine: “It’s super expensive. We would have to calculate how much that is per kilometer. What justifies this?

Gasoline has increased, food has increased: everything is expensive. » A subsidy of 41 million euros returned These prices could however have been lower. The State and several local authorities, including the Occitanie region, the Tarn department, the Castres-Mazamet agglomeration and the Sor and Agout community of communes, had planned an additional envelope of 41 million euros to lower tolls.

But the Council of State issued an unfavorable opinion on this modification of the concession contract, considering that it deviated too much from the financial conditions provided for in the initial call for tenders. A decision which arouses concern among local elected officials. Olivier Fabre, president of the Castres-Mazamet agglomeration, is calling for an emergency meeting between the co-financiers and Atosca to find a solution.

“With the additional subsidy, we could imagine prices which meant that, overall, this motorway would have been slightly more expensive per kilometer than the historic motorways that we know in the region, such as the A9, the A61 or the A62,” he explains. From now on, according to him, the A69 will be one of the recent motorways with the highest prices per kilometer. The elected official therefore wishes to explore other avenues to reduce user bills.

“Won’t it be with an operating subsidy paid a little later? Or through investment assistance? There are a whole bunch of systems that can be studied,” he says, calling on the different financiers to come together.

Machine-translated from French