Notable points of the 2024 Law on Roads

The Law on Roads, which was passed by the National Assembly in June 2024, will take effect on January 1, 2025.

The new Law has three specific noteworthy provisions regarding major policies on mobilizing social resources investment for construction of road infrastructure such as decentralization and delegation of powers to provincial-level People’s Committees in construction, management, operation and maintenance of roads and identification of funding sources for road construction and maintenance and revenues from operation of road infrastructure facilities.

Under the Law, the Prime Minister has the competent to assign provincial-level People's Committees to manage certain national highways to meet socio-economic development requirements and ensure national interests and national defense and security on the basis of localities’ resource-arranging capacity.
 

Notably, the Law devotes a chapter to specifying expressways, allowing the collection of tolls on state-invested or -operated expressways. It provides the collection of tolls on expressways under projects on expansion and upgrading of expressways or expressways upgraded from roads and lays down principles for encouraging organizations and individuals to invest in road infrastructure facilities. It also sets the requirement that expressways must be built in synch with auxiliary facilities such as intelligent transport systems, rest areas, and vehicle load check stations so as to provide utility services to traffic participants.

Regarding road transport, the Law categorizes contract vehicles and tourist vehicles into the group of contract vehicles due to similarities in transport organization under these two models.

By: VLLF