“It is an abusive practice to charge”

The Civil Chamber of the Supreme Court has established that highways cannot charge tolls when they are under construction. This has been determined in a ruling in which has agreed with those affected by the AP-9 works and forces the concessionaire, Autopistas del Atlántico, to return the cost of tolls collected in those situations in which the works it was carrying out seriously affected the flow of traffic.

Those affected were grouped together in the En-Colectivo association, represented by the BGI LAW office, which explained that This ruling supports the position maintained by the court of first instance. and which was, however, revoked by the Provincial Court of Pontevedra. The Public Prosecutor’s Office then filed an appeal before the Supreme Court, to which those affected joined.

The ruling condemns Autopistas del Atlántico (Audasa) “to cease abusive practice of collecting tolls in full to highway users in cases where incidents occur on the highway that can be classified as black (interrupted traffic with road closed), or with red (difficult, very slow traffic with frequent and prolonged stops) or yellow (irregular, slow traffic with sporadic stops), provided that said users have not been provided with information about the state of the road (which includes the kilometer point at which the incident is located, the estimated delay derived from it, or even a brief reference to its cause), with sufficient advance notice so that they could choose, in safe conditions, for not joining the highway or for leaving it early to reach the affected section”.

Furthermore, it also condemns Audasa “to return the amount collected as a toll, along with the legal interest accrued from the date of each paymentto users who have traveled on the section of the AP-9 highway affected by any of the 81 incidents listed” in the ruling.

Juan Camacho, lawyer at BGI LAW, explained that “all clients affected by any of these incidents who keep the receipt may request that are recognized as beneficiaries of the sentence, although they were not part of the accusations”.

For his part, Antonio Heredero, also from BGI LAW, representative of En-Colectivo, recalled that this ruling creates jurisprudence and that, therefore, “from now onany infrastructure that carries out works while continuing to offer the serviceyou will have to keep in mind that you will not be able to collect the toll in the event that the service is affected by said works.”