Rental Car Driving Fines

you say tolls. You also say fines.

Which do you mean - they are different

Hi,

I've received tolls plus a $50 service charge for each one. The service charge and toll amt comes right from the rental car company. I just received a 4th one which is after a year from when I dropped off the car. I think this is fine.

What I am asking about is since it's been 365 since I returned the car, could I still receive a bill/fine (whatever you want to call it)? The rental car company has notified me that they haven't received any requests from the authorities to provided the info. I think the authorities only have 60 days to notify the rental car companies?

are these free flow tolls or not paying at toll booths?

Not sure. I am not worried about the tolls. I am more worried about receiving potential speeding fines or ztl fines

You are right: in Italy a fine have to be notified within 90 days. Is possible there are delays, for example if the company in charge to check the cameras send to the police the infraction details later, or the time required by the rental company to send you the fine.
In any case, from 90 to 365 days the gap is very big... You are always authorized before payment to ask a copy of the fine and check if everything is correct.

Sounds good. Thank you for the help!

This is, yet again, another example of the problems with driving in Europe. Yes, you get the flexibility to stop in the little cafe and have a coffee. The cost is tickets and fines. There are places in Europe where you need to drive. For a lot of trips, the rationale for driving is not sensible.

Take the train, avoid the fines. For the USA driver, the ability to have a car is the mark of adulthood, and the desire to drive in Europe is at some deep primal level below the conscious and rational thought process. The other issue with cars is that, for most trips, you drive 1 day, park 3 days, drive 1 day, park 3 days. Plus you get the speeding tickets. In France, they even warn you, but I got the speeding ticket anyway.

I would not rent a car there again.

I think you will find in that case that the owner needs to be notified within 90.

Then the owner - in this case - the rental car company has time to see who was driving. If it was them they pay the fine within the deadline. If it wasn't them - they had rented it to you and it is your photo on the ticket - they then have the alloted time to notify the authority that it wasn't them, it was you. They then provide your name and address and details.

The authority then has an amount of time to send the fine to the correct driver. If it is an Italian driver I believe - one of our local friends will know - it is another 90.

But if the owner identifies a foreign driver it is a much longer period of time that the authority has. I haven't looked back but I believe it is 360 days from the time they are informed of the correct driver. And then there is the possible delay in the mail because once the notice is in the mail they have met their obligations. I wouldn't be surprised if with COVID delays the mail could easily take a while.

So 365 doesn't quite get you out of the woods.

I am with Nigel. The problem with most regulations quoted is that they are for Italian and EU citizens, and do not apply for non-residents. For visitors there really is no recourse or protections, if you get notice of a fine outside of 90 days, or even a year, other than ignoring, you really have no avenue to protest or receive proof of dismissal; many just pay the fine.

Ok. Thanks

On the flip side - as long as you keep to posted speed limits and know about the 'no go zones' then it shouldn't be an issue (other than where they may have the toll booths that a transponder takes care of). We've rented 3 times in France with no fines or tickets received and the places we went would have been basically undoable with public transport - or would have severely curtailed our sightseeing.

That being said, not sure that we'd ever rent a car in Italy.

This is, yet again, another example of the problems with driving in Europe

No Paul, this is another example of Americans not doing their homework and being able to follow simple directions and obey the driving rules in European countries.

I've driven in Scotland, France and Italy with absolutely no problems. Before I left, I studied up on the signage and regulations of the country in which I intended to drive. It's like studying up for a driving test in the US.

When driving, I paid attention to road signs and made sure not to speed. When in Italy I watched for ZTLs and also assumed any place within the walls of a walled city was ZTL. We just parked outside the walls and walked in. Whether true or not, I assumed there were automated speed checks. Sometimes in rural areas local drivers wanted to go faster than the speed limit. I just found a place to pull over and let them by. I usually got a friendly wave of thanks. Who wants to drive fast through the gorgeous countryside of Tuscany anyway?

We avoid driving in big cities. We commuted in to Paris, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Rome and Florence. We also use trains and buses whenever possible. Still, you can't get to the remote areas of Mull, Skye and the Highlands without a car. You can't explore the hill towns of Tuscany at your own pace without a car. You can't easily reach and stroll through the quaint French village of Chedigny and the nearby beautiful countryside without a car.

You can do as much homework as you want and Italy driving is a complete cluster f. Don't rent there.

Not sure I completely agree.

This is the first year I haven't driven to Italy - in my personal UK car with right hand driving position - for many years. For obvious reasons. But I'll go again next year if I can.

Most years we go to Venice and/or Rome, have spent plenty of time in the Veneto, Lombardy, Tuscany and Umbria, love Vicenza, and have driven as far south as Paestum and Salerno and Sorrento and the Amalfi Coast.

I've had zero issues other than running over a lump of wood just fallen off a truck near Salerno. Even that had a silver lining because the tyre store I was directed to by the road paving crew who came to my rescue was run by a guy who was mad crazy about car racing, especially World Rally Championship (which I follow closely and love), and although he spoke little English and my Italian was at that time pretty thin, and I knew no Neopolitan dialect we had a fabulous half an hour chatting about cars and WRC. The guys got me a new tyre which was perfect and the price was lower than I pay here at Costco.

I've never had an Italian speeding ticket, parking ticket, bus lane ticket, ZTL ticket or any other brush with Italian authority.

I'm careful to know ahead of time what the local driving laws and customs are, because they vary quite a lot from country to country and especially in Italy from region to region. It is helpful to know south of Naples who has arrived at a multi street junction in which order, for example.

a complete cluster f.

Now the fact that you missed a toll sign three times in.... 2 weeks of driving? 3?... doesn't surprise me anymore:

"Look honey, there is no line at the Telepass yellow booth and cars do not stop to pay! it must be a free offer motorway!"

"What else? Let's save some money!"

We lived in Augsburg, Germany from 87-91 and drove all over Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, France, Belgium and Luxembourg.
There were expensive tolls on the Italian Autostrata and with the price of fuel back then, we found taking the trains to be cheaper.

Back then, Germany was loaded with traffic cameras for running a yellow light or speeding (even not wearing your seat belt) that following the speed laws became the norm. None of this stuff in the USA that if the limit is 70 that you can go 80.

After reading so many posts here on this blog about tickets in Italy, I would never opt to drive there again. We are planning a couple of weeks in Umbria and Rome in October 2021 and will train.

We have rented cars in Britain twice in the past 6 years and done rather well. The British drivers are very polite and generally aren't as aggressive as in some parts of the USA.
I did get a ticket in the Cotswolds in 2017 for going 35 MPH in a 30 MPH zone. I was slowing down for a village, but just didn't slow down as much. Ticket was not outrageous, it was $40 GPB. No problem driving in the UK.

I maintain a strong position against driving.

The issue is that USA drivers have an ingrained and irrational need to drive. In the USA, becoming an adult means getting your drivers' license. So, when they go to Europe, the instinctive idea is to drive.

Why not drive?

1) The "unwritten rules" are different. In the USA, you can drive 43 MPH in a 35 MPH zone and be pretty sure you will not get stopped. I have gotten 10 or so tickets, and of those, 1 was for 55 in a 50 zone.
2) There are speed cameras all over Europe. These are unusual in the USA
3) The signs are done differently. In the USA, "left turn" sign means the next road. In many places in Europe, it means RIGHT NOW.
4) Signage on highways in some countries is quite different.
5) Parking is not like in the USA. There's little in most cities.
6) Taking a car means parking the car for 60-80% of the time.
7) Getting into some places is a complete crazy process. To get to our hotel in Chartres, the car had to go through 4-5 checkpoints. You had to explain to the microphone what you were doing. My wife can speak French, but we were both completely flummoxed. Luckily, the driver was from the Enterprise rent-a-car where we had left the car. But the native Chartresian was himself confused by the one-way streets.
8) In Rennes, I was driving inside the city, and suddenly found that the street had become a 1-way street, and I was going the wrong way. I was staring at the city bus, and the bus driver was making very rude gestures at me.

Of course, there are times when a car is needed. If you have 2 or more small children, cars are very helpful. If you have 3 or more people, cars can be less expensive. If you go to some parts of Europe which are primarily rural, public transport is less available. We rented in Finisterre, driving around Bretagne, where I got 3 tickets.

My bias on this topic is primarily against the reflexive "I'm going to Europe for the first time, and really want to drive 120 MPH on the Autobahn".

I am a little confused(which would not take much LOL).
It sounds to me the rental company re-rented your car. Are the tolls etc. dated the time you were there.
We have driven, like Nigel, every time we have been to Italy. Up until last year with no problems.
We did get a ticket which we surmised we would get (we were stuck between 2 delivery trucks on a secondary
road from Cassio to Lecce) saw the police as we drove by at only 10-15 mph over the limit. This was May 15-2018
We were notified 3 months later by Hertz and paid them a fee. And then received a notification that came from
the police indicating there would be a charge. It was one year later that we received the actual charges which we paid right away and have no proplems.

The tolls are mine and I don't mind paying them. I don't like receiving a bill though over a year later. WTH. Is this a 3rd world country?

In general in Italy, about speed, there is a official tolerance of the 5%, but usually a speed trap is set up at the 10% of the limit. It means that if the limit is 50 Km/h (around 35 mph) the speed trap is at 55 Km/h. Usually on European cars the speedometer is set up at a lower level that the real speed, so you have a bigger tolerance.
An example: when I'm on the highway at 130 Km/h on the speedometer the GPS says that I am driving at 118 Km/h.
Driving in another country is difficult: is true. Is valid everywhere. Different traffic laws, different road signs, different unwritten rules. Italy is more complicated than other countries because is crowded. A lot of Italians haven't access to a good and reliable public transport, so for commute they use the car. Italian cities are even old: designed when there wasn't public transport or cars, so narrow streets and not so many parking lots.
Anyway, if you drive for a little in Italy you get used bout all the stuff and probably in few days you can cope with all the unwritten rules. My suggestion: always watch the signs! Don't trust too much on the GPS. And ask to your hotel if you can access without problem: several hotels are in ZTL areas, but the most of cities allow the customers to reach the hotel with the car, you only need to ask how not be fined.

I need to correct myself. about what I wrote some days ago.
The police have to notify a fine within 90 days to people living in Italy. If you live abroad the police has 360 days to send the fine. Reference is Art.201 of "Codice della Strada".
For rented cars the days are counted from when the police is informed about the driver details by the rental company.
For reference: http://www.mit.gov.it/mit/site.php?p=normativa&o=vd&id=1&id_dett=204 . Read the last phrase of the point 1.

I wouldn't be surprised if the courts also allowed some extra leeway in timings if the several months shutdown of most everything due to the pandemic fell during the 360 days.

My bias on this topic is primarily against the reflexive "I'm going to Europe for the first time, and really want to drive 120 MPH on the Autobahn".

That made me think of one of our friends. She got a frantic call from her mother because her 80 year old father had been thrown in jail. It turns out he was driving 100mph in the HOV lane on I-85 in Atlanta. The policeman who pulled him over asked him if he knew how fast he was driving. He answered: "It doesn't matter, I was in the Autobahn lane. There is no speed limit." The more the trooper tried to explain the difference between "HOV" and "Autobahn", the more the offender became belligerent, to the point the frustrated trooper arrested him. Shortly after the incident, the family took away his car keys and drivers license.

Paul, you gave a good list of things to consider. I thought about replying to each item, but I've decided a big part of differences in opinion boils down to personality and driving confidence.

I travel extensively for work, which means I often fly into an area I've never been to. I grab my luggage, get my rental car and hit completely unfamiliar roads, often near big cities in the evening when I'm tired from a long travel day. I guess practice has given me a set of skills and also confidence. While Garmin helps, I pre-plan my trip so I know exactly where I'm going.

I think any prospective driver in Europe should carefully consider the type of driver they are. Are you confident? How is your driving record at home? (I've had one speeding ticket in the last 45 years.) Are you adaptable? Are you detail oriented? Remember there are thousands of US and Canadian tourists, including me, who drive extensively in Europe with no problems.

Having said that, my wife and I have made several trips where we did not rent a car. It would have been a burden. Even when we do rent, we do not drive in cities. Instead, we commute into town from the countryside. Yes, the car sits idle for a day, but these are trips where the focus is on rural areas and there may be only one or two trips into a city center.

Yes, I've seen posts where folks think they will be driving fast on the Autobahn or Autostrada. Still, I see far more posts by nervous Nellies who did not adequately prepare and paid the price. They come back and write "warning" posts that are from a distorted view.

DougMac,
Great post. We lived in Germany for four years and I had a Mercedes 190-D (so called Baby Benz) with a top speed of 110 MPH.
I did find an opportunity to run my car up that speed when driving on a very straight autobahn with little traffic.
However, I found that driving at that speed, you have almost no margin for error. You cannot relax at all. After driving for about half an hour like that, I found that driving about 85-90 MPH that I could relax enough to feel safe and still move on down the road pretty well.

If you aren't used to the Autobahn driving, you must take care. I worked for the US Army had to pass a test showing that I knew the rules of the road in Germany and Europe. For example, if you are going 100 MPH in the left lane and a Porsche comes up behind you going 150 MPH, you are obligated to move over into the right lane. You have to be careful, since there are trucks and some cars going about 60MPH in the right lane. Moving over in time may be an issue in heavy traffic.
If you don't move over and the Porsche hits you in the rear, you are responsible, and probably either dead or in intensive care.