I recently returned from a weekend trip to Bratislava in the Slovak Republic and, like many other countries in Europe (with a few notable exceptions), the Slovak Republic charges a toll to use its motorways. Whereas before one had to stick one of those little vignettes to the windshield of your car as proof of payment (and then somehow get the damn things off again), much of this is now handled electronically such that virtual vignettes are now tied to the license plate of your car instead.
Adding to the convenience, in large part by eliminating the scraping, is that a lot of these countries, including the Slovak Republic, also now helpfully offer e-mail reminders of when your electronic vignette is going to run out. Unhelpfully, however, the Slovakian e-mail contained (or, more accurately, pretty much solely comprised) possibly one of the longest, most confusing, and obfuscated sentences that I have ever read in my life.
How long was it?
Put it this way. This criticism is coming from someone who regularly gets roasted for his overly long sentences. And WordPress’s new AI to help you write more simply and directly? After reading the sentence, it simply quit and directly took up a new job writing beat-poetry haikus.
And here is that sentence:
Dear Customer,
the administrator of collection of vignette payments for the use of specified road sections in the Slovak republic, hereby notifies You through this automatically generated e-mail notification about approaching the expiry date of the electronic vignette for the vehicle NBD-FB007 with the country of registration Germany on 05.08.2024 (inclusive).
Sounds like something German admin would be proud to write. (Or more so a German legal department because it’s arguably much more legalese than officialese.) But they can’t …
… because Germany, you see, is one of those notable exceptions from above. Despite having one of the largest motorway networks in Europe at roughly 13.000 km (second only to the nearly 16.000 km of the surprise winner in Spain, which, admittedly, does have 1.4x more area to cover), only increasingly smaller trucks have had to pay a toll to use it since 2005. (As of this summer, anything over 3.5 t now has to pay.) Although plans have been afoot for about as long to also impose a similar toll on cars, the latest attempt was foiled by the EU courts in 2019 who decided that giving Germans the fee back via tax credits was discriminatory because only foreigners would essentially be paying the motorway toll.
That was five years ago and, by all accounts, a German motorway toll is now such a low priority that we need not fear how German admin will retaliate against (or just try to plain one-up) the e-mail reminders of their Slovakian colleagues.
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