Italian Car Rental Tickets

Why is this a scam? What is outrageous about the tickets? You evidently drove in a ZTL and parked in the wrong place. You should have studied up on Italian driving laws before renting a vehicle. The smart money says to pay the tickets and consider it a lesson learned.

It is all on camera and unfortunately if you keep driving around the block you were tripping the same camera each time. You may want to think it is a scam for your own justification but it is not. An Italian in the same car at the same time would have received the same tickets. Are you sure the first fines were actually fines. Generally the rental will change a service fee between $25 and $50 to turn your personal information over to the authorities so they can send you the tickets. That is first and then the ticket come. Sometimes almost a year later.

It may be outrageous but you do have some responsibility for understanding the traffic system and not violating them. I am sure the sign were there but may not have noticed them in your confusion. I always thought that the cameras were very obvious.

ZTLs, other driving issues:

http://driventoit.blogspot.com/

Most likely the $47 “payments” you made were charges by your car rental company for supplying the police with your contact data. Municipalities in Italy take about a year from the date of infraction to actually send you a ticket. This is not a scam. Most likely you were traveling through ZTL’s and entered the zones 3 times. If you were not aware of their existence, most likely you missed the signs.

You haven’t paid for any tickets.

The ticket for entering a ZTL without authorization starts from a minimum of 80€. To that you need to add an administrative processing fee of 14.20€. Therefore what you paid is not enough to even cover the minimum.

The $47 (about 40€) were the fee charged by the rental car company for providing the name of the rental driver to the authorities. If they charged you such fees twice, it means the rental company had to provide your name twice for two separate instances.

The 107.30€ charges were the actual fines charged by the authorities. They were not a scam. Those fines are enforced by camera, therefore you passed under such cameras 3 times.

As suspected, another first post to gripe or complain. Hey OP, if you had joined and posted BEFORE you went to Italy, we could have provided you with lots of free information that would have helped you avoid fines.

Now that you’re here, here is some valuable free information. Pay the fines and chalk it up to an expensive lesson learned. If you don’t, there’s a good chance it could get even more expensive.

Another happy customer.