January 2 (BTA) - The 392 million leva-plus that Bulgarian and foreign motor-vehicle owners paid for electronic vignettes in 2019 were by some 35 million leva more than the revenues in 2018, the Road Infrastructure Agency said in a press release on Thursday.

Of the 8,233,000 e-vignettes sold last near, nearly 6 million were for passenger cars. Road use brought in revenues totalling 270 million leva by vehicles under 3.5 tonnes and some 122 million leva by vehicles over 3.5 tonnes.

Over 600,000 people bought weekend vignettes, which was introduced in 2019. Nearly half of these road users drove foreign-registered vehicles, mostly from Romania and Germany, followed by Greece.

Bulgarian motor vehicle owners or users purchased more than 5 million e-vignettes, out of a total of 8.2 million leva, and over 4 million of these were for passenger cars, worth almost 234 million leva out of 317 million leva-plus paid in aggregate for e-vignettes by Bulgarians.

Nearly 3 million e-vignettes worth 79 million leva were bought for foreign-registered motor vehicles for the full year 2019. Demand peaked in July and August. In July, the e-vignettes acquired for foreign-registered vehicles outunumbered those bought for Bulgarian-registered ones.

Of all foreign-registered vehicles, the largest number of e-vignettes were obtained for those from Turkey, Romania, Greece and Germany. Last year Bulgarian trucks and buses bought over 1.2 million e-vignettes worth 83 million leva-plus, and those from Turkey more than 500,000 vignettes at the cost of nearly 17 million leva.

The e-vignette fees for 2020 are the same as those in 2019, the Agency recalled. NV/LG
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