Only 3 percent of foreigners pay speed camera buses in Geneva!
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Not all foreign drivers who collect a fine in Switzerland pay it. In Nidwalden it’s only 30 percent!
Anastasia Mamonova, Sven Ziegler
70 percent of the foreigners who were flashed on the street in the canton of Nidwalden in recent years did not pay their fines! That reports dying «Lucerne Newspaper».
If a speeding offender from abroad is flashed on the Swiss streets, the authorities have to work together with their counterparts in the country concerned. It works well with Germany, Austria or Liechtenstein, says Marco Niederberger, head of the Nidwalden traffic and security police, to the “Luzerner Zeitung”.
But the further away the country is from Switzerland, the smaller the proportion of fines that are paid, he notes. In his opinion, a speed offender would be more willing to pay the fine if he expected to visit Switzerland again shortly.
A fine expires after one year. If this is not paid, it will become an ad. This expires after three years.
Speed offenders in Bern are good
The canton of Nidwalden is not the only one with such a problem. Things are even worse in the canton of Geneva. In 2021, over 10,000 buses were sent to countries further away than our neighboring countries. Just 3.3 percent of this was paid, as the Geneva police show in a statistic on Blick. For comparison: almost 67 percent of the French, 59 percent of the Italians and 47 percent of the Germans paid for their buses in Geneva in the same year.
The Bernese, on the other hand, present pleasing figures. It is currently not possible to give any final information on the payment behavior from last year – “because the collection of fines abroad can drag on for months”, as it says on a Blick request. But: “On a long-term average, around 92 percent of the fines in connection with vehicles with foreign license plates were paid.”
The Zurich cantonal police do not keep any statistics on fines in road traffic. However, if you add up all the buses, it shows that just over half of the buses (55 percent) that went abroad last year were justified, according to a statement.
Fines quickly paid after penalties
In Schaffhausen, around a third of last year’s buses went abroad. The police did not reveal how many of them were paid. However, the authorities assume that the country’s distance from Switzerland is not central when it comes to the payment behavior of drivers. “The lack of data exchange with some countries prevents criminal prosecution and leads to non-payment of the fines. We are absolutely dependent on the owner and driver data from the countries so that accused persons can be subjected to criminal prosecution, »says spokeswoman Katarina Carnevale to Blick.
The experience of the Schaffhausen police shows: “If the accused receive a penalty order from the public prosecutor’s office of the canton of Schaffhausen for not paying the fine, the fines that have not been paid by then are often paid as soon as possible. There are very few who do not react to a criminal order from the public prosecutor’s office.”