I was pulled over by the local police this morning for failing to stop at a Stop sign.
The road was clear, but yes, guilty as charged! I showed my GB license and car reg documents. They said they will send the penalty notice to my British address in 2-4 weeks. €90!..seems a bit steep?..do I have to pay?
Yes. Why would expect to be exempt?
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Yes you do have to pay, 90 euros is the fine for this offence. Why should having a GB license make you exempt ?
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If they bother to put it on the system and send it then yes you will have to pay it, because once it’s on the system that’s the only way to stop the fine escalating. Best pay quickly if/when you get the notice. Is 90€ the standard fine or the fine with the prompt payment discount knocked off? Normally there’s a standard rate, and a lower rate if you pay promptly, and then if you delay paying it goes up rather significantly…
PS The road obviously wasn’t clear - there was a flic that you failed to spot 
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Just pay it, why wouldn’t you?
€90 is the standard rate, it will go up to 135 if you don’t pay within 45 days of a date on the notice then up again if you still haven’t paid, then court proceedings start.
Just be grateful it isn’t also costing you 4 points, which is the tariff for not respecting a stop sign.
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They will chase you for the money, didn’t used to, they used to demand the money at the roadside.
The UK refused to sign up to the EU vehicle information sharing scheme, then the Dartford crossing went pay in advance, foreign drivers weren’t paying, so the UK signed up so they could chase the non payer’s.
Seems the French state have now cottoned on to the fact that catching motorists can be quite lucrative. Latest trick is unmarked car fitted with a speed camera parked at the side of the road with other vehicles. They park as close as possible to the village sign because they know drivers put their foot down as they drive out of the 50KMH zone. You don’t even know you’ve been nicked until the fine arrives in your postbox. Fixed penalty 90€. Apparently thousands are getting nicked.
Can someone enlighten me. If you have moved to France recently and sold your house in Uk and they send your fine to your old address because you havent yet managed to obtain a French license, how do you know when the fine arrives?
A bit like when you get penalised here for missing the tax foncere deadline because the french somehow think you are at your old address. Derrrr!
If it’s a French reg car they send the fine to the address the car is registered to, not the address on your licence. If you live in France but you’re still driving on English plates, well…
There are also unmarked cars driving around fitted with cameras that automatically clock speeding cars. No human intervention needed, the driver just drives and the technology does the rest.
Quite correct Anne, one got moi. One thing to ponder on is latest news is private companies are going to take over the job of driving around in unmarked cars nicking motorist’s. Let’s all hope the employers are not operating some form of bonus scheme based on more you nick, more you get.
Well come on Trevor if you cannot understand that agricultural workers are incapable of working without bribing them with bonuses how can you expect those hunting speeding motorists not to demand the same?
Incapable of working? What I actually said is without an incentive, pickers won’t kill themselves picking crops all day for minimum wage, and even if you paid treble the minimum wage how could you guarantee that pickers would pick enough to make you a profit. As we all we know, when local councils in the UK farmed out parking control to private companies, the employees on bonuses went after people deemed to be illegally parked with a vengeance, clamping anyone and everyone.
Err… and I said that that farmer couldn’t get the workforce without paying almost double minimum wage. On the parasitic law enforcers I couldn’t agree more, it would be a licence to print money.
But the drivers don’t even know how many are being nicked. They just drive along the routes they’re instructed to drive along. It’s the next closest thing to using a self drive car and no doubt eventually it will be. One of the problems is, how boring it is for the drivers who do nothing but drive round in the same circles all day every day.
That’s what I have a problem with. You have absolutely no chance of appealing the fine, no memories whatsoever of the location where you were nicked, no chance of challenging the fine on any sort of grounds whatsoever. Companies could simply employ people to indiscriminately note peoples registration number’s as they drive passed, then send out fines willy nilly regardless of whether you are speeding or not. Then no doubt it would be the usual clerical error response from the company involved. I read an article recently about a case in Norfolk where a chap had been accused of doing over ninety in a forty limit. A single police officer said he picked the chaps speed up while doing a random speed check on passing driver’s. Chap ended up in court, police had no evidence whatsoever, only the word of the officer involved. Chap got heavy fine and four points on his license.
In UK motoring case law there is precedence for conviction of an offence based on the word of a Police Officer. Even just a visual ’ I saw him drive by and estimated his speed at xxx’ or ‘I saw him do Uturn at no Uturn sign’ without corroborating evidence is permissable and will result in a conviction.
I don’t have any knowledge of the same rule applying based on the statement of a non-Police Officer (Joe Public) for motoring without any corroborating evidence.
An incentivised agency acting for the Police would be an interesting grey area.
I guess they have photos to clearly show your reg no stamped with speed and GPS location? As said, the people who drive the cars don’t nick people, the camera does. The people who drive the cars don’t control the camera, it’s there in the car and it does its own thing. The driver doesn’t know whether the camera has snapped 5,000 speeding motorists while he’s been driving, or none at all. In theory there is no room for human error/manipulation of the system. So I don’t see how there would be any incentive offered for nicking more speeders, what is there to incentivise, their job is simply to drive where they’re told to drive.
Norfolk isn’t in France, the rules are different in the UK and I have no idea what they are and whether there are national checks in place to ensure fair treatment of drivers or whether each police force can set their own. I do seem to recall from when I lived in London that one “old bill” on his own in a jam sandwich was not authorised to issue a speeding fine, there had to be two old bills in the car. But it’s hard to argue with a photgraph unless the calibration is out in which case there will be lots of appeals against that same camera. I supose with a radar gun there might be space for user error, I don’t know.
yes you will have to pay it and as already advised you should do so as quickly as possible and send it recorded delivery so you have proof. I assure you they will follow it up just as they do in England. I was doing about 5 miles over the speed limit in town in england in a french registered car - caught on camera and they sent the fine to me in france.
Yes of course you will have to pay it! But as others have said, when you receive the fixed penalty notice, you may find it is reduced to €45 if you pay it promptly.
If you don’t already have Royal Mail international mail forwarding set yp, maybe you need to think about doing so urgently; or, just notify the new owners of your French address and ask them if they would kindly forward mail for you; you could always send them a ready-addressed envelope and money for a stamp.
Do I understand you are now living in France permanently? If so, this driving offence which does carry a points penalty will mean you will now be obliged to convert your licence to a French one; I tried to ignore it, and got a visit from the Gendarmes, who gave me a short deadline in which to sort it.
Many thanks for your reply. I’m not living here permanently, and the gendarme didn’t ask for an address here!..prob because the car and my license are registered to my UK address. I’m going back at the end of this month, and returning to France for Christmas. Hopefully I will find it’s been reduced to €45!