The Truck’s Actual Toll Bill, Across Europe

The fastest route and the cheapest route are rarely the same line on the map. In Europe the difference is usually tolls — and they come in two flavours that a passenger-car estimate gets wrong in opposite directions: distance-based tolls on the French autoroutes and Italian autostrade, and time-based vignette or Go-Box charges across the DACH region and Central Europe. For a 5-axle, 40-tonne truck, neither one looks like a car’s rate.

NAPSPAN’s routing endpoint returns the toll cost computed for the truck you’re actually moving. Opt in on a route request and you get back two things: a per-currency total for the whole trip, and a per-section breakdown naming each toll system and the fare that applies to your vehicle class.

Opt In With include

Toll pricing is opt-in, because computing it has an upstream cost — you only pay for it when you ask. Add "tolls" to the include array on POST /api/v1/routing/route:

curl -X POST "https://api.napspan.com/api/v1/routing/route" \
  -H "X-API-Key: your_key" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "origin":      { "lat": 48.1351, "lng": 11.5820 },
    "destination": { "lat": 45.4642, "lng": 9.1900 },
    "currency": "EUR",
    "truck": {
      "profile":  "tractor",
      "weight_t": 40.0,
      "height_m": 4.0,
      "axles":    5
    },
    "include": ["tolls"]
  }'

That’s Munich→Milan over the Brenner for a 5-axle, 40-tonne tractor — a trip that crosses an Austrian distance-toll section and the Italian autostrada network. The currency field (ISO 4217) controls what fares are reported in; the truck profile you already send is what makes the price the truck’s price.

The Response

Two places carry toll data. The route summary gets a toll_costs array — one entry per distinct currency, because a single trip can cross systems billed in different currencies (a route through Switzerland mixes EUR and CHF). Each route section gets a tolls array naming the systems charged on that stretch and the fares within them.

{
  "routes": [
    {
      "summary": {
        "distance_m": 492000,
        "duration_s": 21600,
        "toll_costs": [
          { "currency": "EUR", "value": 96.40 }
        ]
      },
      "sections": [
        {
          "distance_m": 184000,
          "duration_s": 8100,
          "summary": "A13 Brenner Autobahn (AT)",
          "tolls": [
            {
              "system": "ASFINAG / Brenner",
              "fares": [
                { "name": "Category 4+ (4+ axles)",
                  "price": { "currency": "EUR", "value": 49.10 } }
              ]
            }
          ]
        },
        {
          "distance_m": 308000,
          "duration_s": 13500,
          "summary": "A22 / A1 autostrada (IT)",
          "tolls": [
            {
              "system": "Autostrade per l'Italia",
              "fares": [
                { "name": "Class 5",
                  "price": { "currency": "EUR", "value": 47.30 } }
              ]
            }
          ]
        }
      ],
      "geometry": { "type": "LineString", "coordinates": [ /* ... */ ] }
    }
  ],
  "route_id": "rt_9c40f2ab"
}

The summary.toll_costs value is the sum of that currency’s section fares — the number you’d quote a customer or drop into a lane-cost model. The sections[].tolls[] detail is where you see which operator charges what, so you can explain the bill or compare against a toll-free alternative.

Priced for the Vehicle, Not a Car

This is the whole point. The fare you get back is keyed to the truck profile on the request — axle count, gross weight, height, and the hazmat flag all factor into the toll category the engine prices against. A 5-axle combination doesn’t get a car’s rate; a heavy load doesn’t get a light-vehicle rate. The fares[].name echoes the category that was applied (e.g. “Category 4+”) so you can confirm the truck was rated the way you expected.

Routing Around Tolls

Sometimes the answer is to skip the toll road entirely. That’s a different field: put "tolls" in the avoid array and the engine routes around toll facilities where it can, so you can weigh the toll-free option’s extra time and distance against the money saved.

{ "origin": { /* ... */ }, "destination": { /* ... */ },
  "truck": { /* ... */ },
  "alternatives": 1,
  "avoid": ["tolls"],
  "include": ["tolls"] }

Request an alternative alongside the avoid, keep "tolls" in include, and you get both routes priced — the fast tolled line and the toll-free detour — to make the trade-off explicit instead of a guess.

What to Expect From the Data

A few honest notes so the numbers behave the way you expect:

• Distance-toll motorways price well — French autoroutes, Italian and Spanish autostrade/autopistas, Austrian sectional tolls, and similar network operators return per-category truck fares reliably.
• Vignette and box systems are time- or registration-based. Where a country charges by vignette or an on-board unit rather than per trip, a route may surface the system without a clean per-trip fare — treat a missing price as “not priced here,” not “free,” and account for the periodic vignette separately.
• It’s a planning estimate. Toll pricing is computed at request time for the route and vehicle class; it’s built for dispatch and quoting, not for reconciling an operator statement to the cent.
• No tolls, no array. A toll-free route, or a request that didn’t opt in, simply omits toll_costs and section tolls — the response shape stays stable.

One Call, the Whole Trip

Toll pricing rides the same POST /api/v1/routing/route as the corridor hazard warnings[] and the driving-time break planning. A single cross-border request (DE → AT → IT in one query) can hand back a drivable truck route, the closures and restrictions on it, where the driver must legally stop, and what the trip costs in tolls — the operational picture a dispatcher actually needs before the truck rolls. Routing is a paid-plan feature with a free 14-day trial.

Try It

• API docs — full request and response reference for POST /api/v1/routing/route
• Live map — explore the underlying data across European NAPs
• Free API key — no card, 14-day trial