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Comment by bowsamic | Hacker News Reader

It is shocking to me how expensive the roads are in France, and you don’t get any quality for it either

Yes, exactly, last time driving from Reims to Paris and then to Belgium started to really think about that when driving in toll after another, week after that started to work on this.

That's a very strange statement to me. In my experience, France has extremely high motorway quality, one of the absolute best in Europe. Comparing with autobahn, there's no competition. And this is without even including supporting infrastructure like aires.

When I used them, the rest stops were infrequent and of very poor quality

No quality? They are almost perfect and you have rest stops every 15-20 km, even in remote areas, and emergency beacons every 2 km.

And that's despite having very heavy traffic including a huge portion of heavy trucks transit across Europe.

Excellent but expensive in my experience. If you don't want to pay you can usual take a toll free road, but then you pay in time.

Yes, thats quite common practise and hey when on holiday, it might not be so bad if its not mountains and low torq

From my experience driving between Lyon, Paris, Bordeaux, La Rochelle, etc. the highways are pristine.

That's because the State delegated construction and exploitation to private entities.

It was initially a fixed term contract to build and exploit the roads, where government had 50% stake in the company. When the contract reached its term, instead of keeping operating the roads, government sold its stake. That started a massive hike in prices, firing of thousands employees.

On the other hand, were the previous prices covering the actual costs or was it partially supported by money coming from taxes? Whereas now the toll has to cover the maintenance and gives money back to the state through taxation of private companies.

Same question for the countries where it is state-owned and cheaper.

In our data France is infact the dearest per kilometre, now when taking a closer look: about €11 per 100 km for a car, more for a camper.

The motorways are run by private concession companies, which is why each stretch has its own booth price.

Free alternative are the N and D roads, slower but toll-free, which is often how locals do longer trips on a budget.

In the US they keep telling us that private companies are more efficient than government.

I mean that is often times true. But efficiency in this context - particularly with infrastructure - usually means extracting most profit while providing the bare minimum of service.

The expectation that the service gets either better for the same amount, or cheaper for the same service, is usually naive

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