Congestion Charge London

Transportation, Travel and Trips
1
I’m driving my Tesla to London in Oct and was wondering the pro’s and con’s of registering my Swiss number plate. However, congestion charge will even apply to EV’s after 2024.

2
I brought our Swiss registered car back from London in August.

A few weeks later, we received at the registered address (our office) the fine letter (in German!), including photo.

12.50GBP charge has been inflated to 105 CHF, or 210 CHF if you don't pay promptly. Unfortunately, my Swiss Efficient accounts dept paid it before I saw it...

The car is of course EURO6 compliant... the robbing effers at Euro Parking Collection who have been contracted to rape the wallets of motorists on behalf of the Emir of London just have a blanket policy that ALL unrecognised registrations are considered guilty until proven innocent.

(Given the fact that they obviously could find the registered address for the vehicle from the plate, one has to ask why the same process did not give them a clue as to the likelihood of the car being compliant?)

Setting aside the discrimination this poses towards the very tourists London claims to welcome, it's a total waste of time on their behalf. I have now registered the car and am going through the claim process to get the money back.

tl;dr: Definitely register your car before going, to avoid painful paperwork.

Kind regards

Ian

3

My understanding is that you pay the congestion charge of GBP 12.50 just for being in the zone, whatever your vehicle is, except that you may be entitled to a Cleaner Vehicle Discount.

The other charge, which eairicbloodaxe would not be subject to but others may, is the ULEZ charge (also GBP 12.50).

Details here:

https://tfl.gov.uk/modes/driving/congestion-charge

https://tfl.gov.uk/modes/driving/ult…-emission-zone

4
And if you're going round the east side of London don't forget the completely different registration for the Dartford Crossing.

5

Which also manages to find you in Switzerland. Source: previous experience.

Kind regards

Ian

6
You could read the links you posted.

7
How do they get the contact details of the registered vehicle? Switzerland and U.K. are not part of the EU and U.K. is definitely not part of Schengen Treaty.

Furthermore, why would Switzerland enforce other countries law on their own citizens.

I qualify for the discount so I’m not looking for excuses not to pay, but I would like to know if Switzerland & U.K. signed a treaty to exchange info on their citizens?

8
No treaty is required, it works like this:

The DoT in the UK is part of the woke blob. The blob used to be confined to Whitehall but now has cells all over the UK. Greta can access the information held by the blob. She collates the information and sends it to the relevant authorities in your country. The information is held on her computer systems for posterity. This means that your children may be asked to explain why their parents engaged in such activity. OK, if you were driving a Tesla, this could be considered mitigating circumstances and there would be no consequences.

9
Please don't. There's people on here who will take this seriously.

10

There are a whole bunch of treaties, presumably one of them covers this (for example the UK-EU version http://brexitlegalguide.co.uk/data-s…-uk-agreement/ ).

If Switzerland doesn’t enforce the law (presumably via a treaty) then the other country could relaliate, the most obvious option being to simply ban Swiss registered vehicles.

In some cases they also do it through a private process - for example the parking company in the UK passes the debt to a company in Switzerland who enforces it through the normal debt laws. There have been court challenges to this with mixed results, for example due to the CH company adding excessive additional costs or general rules on parking/tolls being different.

11

Anyone with a legitimate interest can get the contact details of the registered holder, even if you have barred information from the autoindex (Art. 89g SVG). If you have not barred the information on autoindex , then anyone can get it for any reason.

A treaty is only needed for direct access to the vehicle database. Only France and Germany have access which is offered via EUCARIS . Due to Brexit UK has now only EUCARIS access for tachograph cards.

12
There is no need to pay the CC if you have a Swiss registered car. The sell the debt to private debt collection companies and then those companies try to get the money back to pocket themselves hence the inflated sums they request. Just keep on ignoring them then they will usually give up after 12 months or so.

13
Usually? And if they don't give up. Why take the risk? For a measly CC fee. Is the rest of your decision making so poor?

14

Maybe, but the point of registering is to avoid the unnecessary paperwork, not to avoid the fine.

(We avoided the ULEZ fine in the first place by having a EURO6 compliant car.)

The company that contacted us is not a private debt collector. It's the public company officially contracted to handle the raping of motorists wallets.

Kind regards

Ian

15
ULEZ has taken London from being one of the most polluted large cities in Western Europe to one of the least polluted. PM 2.5 values there are now lower than pretty well every comparable large city in Europe (couple of exceptions in Northern Europe). They don't want your money, they don't want you to drive in London at all (by preference) or at least not in a more polluting car.

16
Are you going to start telling me how to write?

I read the links and that was my understanding....

17
I do not believe this has happened in such a short space of time simply due to ULEZ. More likely an artifact of Covid/work from home, coupled with ULEZ. I looked at the data briefly and could see it wasn't a good comparison.

Kind regards

Ian

18
ftfy

19
Not sure you have fixed it for me. I still do not believe it, whether I want to or not.

I may of course be wrong in my reading of the data which drives my belief. That's a different matter.

Kind regards

Ian

20

A good comparison is the London smog problem of the fifties:

This was solved by legislation to stop the burning of coal in the city.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog_of_London

If covid was an important factor, why did the pollution in other European cities not fall as much ?