The traffic fine money machine is friendly and courteous on the phone
rzwitserloot posted in politics on June 23rd, 2006

As many of my friends know, I’m not entirely happy with the dutch sanctions system for minor traffic infractions.

One of the problems I have with the system is the notification: It comes with sparse information, months after the infraction, by standard postal mail. Which can get lost and has no actual guarantee.

Turns out some camera appears to have been misconfigured as I received notice I ran a red light. It’s at zuidwal, which has seen major construction work done, which might be part of the problem.

Unfortunately, the notice I received was a notice of raising the fine because I didn’t pay before the deadline. I never received the original notice though. The failure of not requiring signature at the door for receiving it shows its ugly head. Worse, this version has no information whatsoever about what to do to at least get the picture, and there’s a deadline on challenging the fine.

So, I called up the CJIB, the central organization that takes care of foisting a billion euros of fines on the dutch populace every year. They were actually quite friendly, and, get this, their policy on missing letters is this:

no problem, we’ll just send you a new one and start the whole process from scratch - revert the fine to the original amount, reset your 6 weeks of challenge time, the works.

Because they are 3 to 4 weeks worth behind on correspondence (apparently, few of those billion bucks a year are going into the CJIB itself), the second ‘first notice’ will arrive well after the deadline for this second notice has ran out. After the second you get a very pricey third, and after that, I’m not sure what’ll happen. I guess they’ll go and impound something or other. She did warn me to keep placing lots of calls to make sure that doesn’t happen (oh great, that makes me feel safe) but basically my simple telephone call has put the whole process on indefinite hold until they resend that first notice.

Well, that’s certainly a creative way to avoid paying some fairly serious money to the post office for getting signed delivery of notices. I wonder how long that will remain an effective tactic if everyone and their uncle knows about it, but given the history of fines in the Netherlands, turns out the vast majority consider it a sort of shadow road tax and just pay it up without either learning any lessons (difficult if you disagree with the fine + don’t know when the heck that happend + don’t get a picture) or taking too much trouble to try and get the whole thing wiped clean. The fact that the dutch system does not bother with ‘points’ on a driving licence that could lead to losing it for too many minor infractions also doesn’t help motivate people to challenge their fines.

The upshot being a significant boost to the national budget stemming from traffic fines. But that’s neither here nor there in this discussion. I’ll keep you posted about my further exploits in trying to get this thing set to rights.