Autoroutes - a new service for British visitors

A boon to those with right-hand drive cars, the télépéage is now available to UK residents

France’s autoroutes are second to none and a delight to use. They’re scrupulously maintained with frequent rest areas and service stations. Being tollroads, they are largely empty of local traffic.



Frequent users subscribe to the télépéage system known as Liber-t. For them, there’s no more queuing for a ticket to join the autoroute and none when they pay to leave it. It’s all down to a little box of tricks attached to the windscreen which clocks the car in and out of the autoroute network.

Until now, this was only available to people with a French bank account but one of the autoroute operators, Sanef, has extended it to the UK. They’ve probably twigged that it’s a pain using a left-handed tollbooth in a right-hand drive car.

The driver receives one simple bill for each month’s journeys and it’s paid by direct debit.

This avoids several national sports. N° 237 is played out at the exit - watching the car in front as driver and passengers frantically hunt for their toll ticket or face being adrift in the autoroute system for ever.

Once they’ve found the ticket, the game goes into extra time as the driver wonders where he put his credit card. Hunting it down provides a new opportunity to lose the ticket...

Then there’s N° 238, stopping the car near enough to the ticket machine to insert the ticket and the card. Any Spanish truck driver can halt his 38 Tonner just centimetres from the slot and deftly insert the ticket with his delicate little hand. Car drivers are in a different league.

Even left-hand drivers struggle with this, often stopping a metre away. I once watched a Belgian give his ticket and card to his wife so that she could walk around the car to the payment machine.

A hundred metres or so later the deafening silence finally got to him. He found himself alone, having driven away without her. Running after him, she was clubbed to the ground by the descending barrier. They were just starting their holiday, but probably not a long one.

Right-hand drivers usually delegate payments to a lady passenger, typically the one with the shortest arms.

Well, the Télépéage spoils all this fun by doing away with ticket. The French call it a “badge”, the British a “tag”. Tech-heads and snooty people like me call it a “transponder”, because it only speaks when spoken to.

This little box sticks to the windscreen up behind the rear-view mirror. Sensors in the tollbooth detect the arriving car. This triggers a short message to the transponder which replies with its serial number. Bingo, job done! The autoroute computer now knows where the car is and opens the barrier.

Often the left-most lanes are reserved for Télépéage allowing users to overtake lowly ticket holders and drive straight through. The latest Télépéage lanes can handle cars at up to 30kph.

All this is available in France to those with French bank accounts from operators such as Sanef (see the links below) and now also to UK residents through their British subsidiary, Sanef Tolling.

Subscribing to the service has an up-front cost of €39.14, but this includes a €20 refundable deposit for transponder. There’s a monthly service charge of €5 with a maximum of €10 per year.

The autoroute péages also take credit/debit cards and cash. However they don’t accept certain cards such as Visa Electron, Moneo and some pre-paid cards. There’s a reason for this.

With most cards, payment systems automatically accept low value transactions. Autoroute toll amounts are usually small and so pass automatically. The Visa Electrons of this world require that every payment be validated on line. That takes time and causes queues at the tollbooths. So autoroutes don’t take them.

There’s always at least one toll lane which takes cash. This is a legal requirement in France. Sometimes there’s a human operator but increasingly its done by a machine, which also gives change.

Some machines take both cards and cash but this may not be immediately obvious to foreigners. Signs above each lane indicate which combination of cards, cash or Télépéage are accepted.

Happy motoring and we hope to see you in France really soon.

Related links :

• http://www.saneftolling.co.uk/
• http://www.sanef.com/Offres-Liber-t/Offres-Liber-t/Offres-Liber-t