Though preparations for the e-toll system took months, the Czech Roads Directorate announced recently that it does not have enough supervisors to monitor truckers and crack down on those who do not install mandatory electronic tags meant to work with the e-toll in their vehicles.

"There will be some delay in the launch of a supervisory system that will monitor all vehicles," Deputy Transportation Minister Jiří Hodač said. Until then, he said, authorities would be unable to "realize how many of them are avoiding the toll."

Along 970 kilometers (600 miles) of roads, tolls of a little more than 4 Kč (19 U.S. cents) per kilometer are charged to all trucks that weigh 12 metric tons (13 short tons) or more.

Hodač said he believed that only 80 percent to 85 percent of trucks were paying the toll.

Lidové noviny reported Jan. 12, however, that truckers are getting creative and avoiding the tolls.

In order to pass through tollgates without being charged, some truckers are wrapping their electronic tags with tinfoil, the newspaper reported. This blocks the communcation between the tags and scanners placed in tollgates. Since the government so far failed to employ a control mechanism, this trick could work for a while, the paper said.

Lidové noviny also reported that truckers are avoiding toll roads by choosing alternative routes — a reality long feared by some communities that thought the toll system would increase traffic on local roads.

"It is true that some smaller truckers may be doing this," said Martin Felix, spokesman for

Česmad, the leading Czech trucking association. "But, following the experience from Germany or Austria, it's likely that most trucks will eventually return to main roads."

Meanwhile, it appears there are not enough electronic tags to go around. The government thought 80,000 tags would be sold this year at a price of 1,500 Kč each; 83,000 were sold in the first four days of the system's operation.

The government is now calling on Austrian e-toll developer Kapsch, which is in charge of collecting tolls, to come up with 60,000 more.

Some border crossings are out of tags, and that has spelled trouble for foreign trucks, which are also required to purchase them (though they may return them and get refunds when leaving the country).

One of the most congested areas is along the Czech-Slovak border in Břeclav, South Moravia, where 16-kilometer traffic jams have been reported.

The Transportation Ministry is still unsure of just who it wants supervising the whole system: It failed to call a tender for the job in time, and now information technology company LogicaCMG is filling in.

The Anti-Monopoly Office is investigating the Transportation Ministry's deal with Kapsch.