A69: the motorway is open, and so is the €20.40 toll

The A69 motorway is open to motorists, according to Le Monde, after four years of opposition. Since 2023, environmental associations have multiplied legal challenges and rallies against a project that became a symbol of the ecological struggle. The Toulouse-Castres return trip costs €20.40, one of the highest tolls in France, a figure that draws criticism even from within the ranks of its supporters.

That's the facts. The rest is our reading.

Twenty euros forty to go to Castres and come back. Do the maths over a month of domestic journeys: this is no longer a road, it's a subscription. The promoters sold the end of isolation. Many residents are discovering an à la carte end of isolation, reserved for those who can pay every morning to save time. Everyone else will keep the national road, if it stays in good condition. The dispatch does not yet say what the real traffic will be, or who will use the route. That unknown matters, and we will follow it.

For the class question is there, more than in the tarmac. When an infrastructure is handed to a private concessionaire, the toll is not an accident: it is the mechanism. A asset that could be public becomes a rent, extracted from the daily travel of people who have no choice. Marxists call this, in a continuous version of accumulation by dispossession, the conversion of common resources into private capital. Here, a corridor between a metropolis and a mid-sized town becomes an asset that generates income. We are not saying everything is decided in the details of the contract, which we have not seen. We are saying the logic is legible.

There is also the rift between town and countryside, which Marx and Engels already addressed with the notion of a metabolic rift: a system that separates, concentrates, then bills for the link. Toulouse sucks in jobs and services. Around it, people are invited to get about by car, across concreted land, with a fuel that is not paid for only at the pump. The territory organises itself around the car, and then the car becomes the condition of life.

We will hear the usual refrain: choose the train, carpooling, sobriety. Everyone, apparently, is responsible. Except that nobody consulted the Castres motorist about the route, and emissions have owners: those who decide, build and collect. Punitive ecology, here, does not target the powerful but the user who pays twice, in euros and in climate.

What remains is a defeat, at least provisional, for four years of mobilisation. It does not prove the struggle was in vain: it shows how hard it is to stop a building site when the State and capital march in step. A public mobility service, planned, free or nearly so, is what the debate should have put on the table. Instead, we have a toll. Bon voyage.