Algarve Tolls: My First Outing With My New Transponder
So the majority of us have protested, some of us have been a fan of the tolls and a few thousand more have had no opinion at all.
As you know from my previous posts I have been a fan of the tolls as long as Portugal don’t make it too hard to understand or they stop all foreign cars coming on the toll roads which neither of this applies.
I liked the idea of the Algarve Tolls because it gives the authorities a better chance to keep an eye on the illegal vehicles that are coming on the roads. We are all too aware of the amount of English cars that are SORN in the UK and are not insured or taxed here – so if we could reduce just a couple of these it would be great in my eyes.
So after getting our transponder last week we finally had our first trip out on the motorway to go and collect our first Christmas food shop. We went from Silves to Almancil to collect our Asda and Play.com from Algarve Freight Centre. (And if you were there I was the girl at reception filling lots of bin bags with Play.com items that I had ordered).
Book between hitting the motorway and passing the turn off for Albufeira there was not one other car on the road going in the same direction as us at 3pm in the afternoon, a time that I would automatically consider to be moderate for traffic.
It was frankly unbelievable!!!!!
I always new as a paying customer that the roads would be quieter because a lot of people wont have the transponders or cant afford the price and would rather save the money but I still didn’t expect it to be this quiet.
I’m sure it wont cost me the earth to use the motorway as it is only for pleasure, so at the worst case scenario it would be about 8 trips out a month.
What does amuse me about the Algarve Tolls though is that how long it has taken them to do. For example it has always been next month, then the month after so I am glad that all the guessing is finally over and the tolls are all sorted out.
Though beware avoid the Post Office at the moment because just like the tills in the supermarkets they only have a select few open. Dominic went to get our Christmas cards all posted this morning and he returned 2.5 hours later. They were all queuing for their transponders with just three assistants dealing with them. And even though his Portuguese is not perfect he could clearly understand the pensioners swearing by how long they had to wait for their pensions.
When I was at the Algarve Freight Centre and chatting to others about their Transponders one guy did say he got his six months ago – so here is to all of you that didn’t mess about got yours set up and avoided the horrible queues.
