Bucharest City Hall ponders new capital city road tax 'in a year or two'

In order to support investment projects such as a suspended highway and also to improve traffic conditions in the capital city, the Bucharest City Hall plans to introduce a new tax called “buvinieta” for all the vehicles crossing the capital city, within a year or two. The tax' name would be similar to the national road tax called 'rovinieta', but its introduction will be decided next year, if other funding methods fail. The idea of this new road tax called first appeared in 2006, during Adriean Videanu’s mandate and has been widely criticized, including by the Social Democratic Party (PSD) Bucharest. "Taxation of central area will be introduced only if the other two measures, namely improving public transport and the new parking policy will not work. If these two systems will work, there won’t be any need of this tax. (…) It is not set in stone, we need to see what will happen after we implement these two measures”, said Marcel Nicolaescu, deputy mayor of Bucharest. Currently taxes apply in Bucharest for vehicles that exceed 3.5 tones, depending on tonnage and areas. Ioana Toader, ioana.toader@romania-insider.com