Just been stung for 350 CHF!!

Fair cop I suppose as I was doing 66 in a 50. Not long over here from the UK and still getting used to thinking/driving in kph - it just didn't seem like I was going that fast at the time.

I consider myself very fortunate as a Swiss colleague reckons I must have been right on the edge of receiving an automatic ban. So it's an expensive lesson but one well-learned, I'm going to literally 'crawl' through 50-zones from now on and just have to get used to being tailgated

I've seen one do it (at the traffic circle at the Lugano train station)!

Tom

(In case this is ambiguous, this means that you win the square of gold award for the day.)

I got one recently too. I saw the flash so knew it was acoming.

Took one month and a day to arrive ... foolishly I was begining to think I had gotten away with it.

But then it wouldn't be accurate, and this is Switzerland.

I find that a GPS and cruise control contributed greatly to the maintenance of my driver's license.

Seriously, your GPS is way more accurate than your in car speedometer and you should drive as fast as is legal and safe if you like. The cruise control keeps one from driving quickly in situations that might call for it and your judgement tells you are safe, even thought those speeds are technically illegal and you may get nabbed for it.

Good luck staying out of trouble.

Wow, is cruise control illegal in Switzerland?

This is only true under conditions of zero acceleration. My in car speedo is pretty good for a six year old Mini so my GPS isn't 'way' more accurate.

did you see spot the pair of snails towing the car?

'course not...

yeah it is. It will always be a few kph below what your speedo is showing thus not being accurate.....

No. I meant that it keeps you from getting into situations where you are driving faster than the legal limit because it is perfectly safe for everything but your wallet.

While what you say is true regarding GPS, it is also true for speedometers. If you are accelerating you cannot really be watching your instruments with the kind of accuracy that the legal requirements necessitate. You have to stop accelerating sooner than you get up to speed otherwise you would be over by the time you let up because of overshoot. You simply ignore the hysteresis inherent in the system.

I am just saying that all speedometers in CH are a few percent slow as is required by law. If they are not then someone has modified the car in some fashion or the equipment is malfunctioning. Eg. my wife's Audi and my BMW both read high by about 4 to 6 % as was required.

If one likes to drive quickly and feel the acceleration and one has a car that can do it well and one keeps to the speed limit then there is a very real possibility of accidentally breaking the speed limit. In all but one of my tickets I received whilst living in Switzerland I had no intention of breaking the speed limit. But intent doesn't count as it's more like "tag, gotcha!"

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Many men, of course, became extremely rich, but this was perfectly natural, and nothing to be ashamed of, because no one was really poor -- at least no one worth speaking of. - Douglas Adams

Not required by law but is required by self-preservation on the part of the car manufacturers. Imagine the lawsuits resulting from fines if speedos under registered.

When I was young (which was a long, long time ago, oh boy), the traffic law said that a speedo may show between 5 % too little to 10 % too much. The idea was that indicating too much doesn't result in speedin -- the lawmakers believing that drivers stick to what they see on the speedo. Go figure...).

On the other hand, 5% got subtracted from the radar reading anyway before calculating the rest. That was the speedo error allowance so to say, so that, if your speedo underindicated, you were still withing the legal range when sticking to the speedo.

Not exactly great math, but you know how politicians and desktop administrators often are, and the basic idea is reasonable.

I don't know if this practice still is the same.

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"This is AMAZING! I have the exact amount of money Joe Biden has cost us playing golf in my sweatpants pocket!" — Kona Lowell

Ya in the US when someone is going slower than I want to go, I can just go around them. But in CH it seems like everyone just goes as fast as the car in front of the line.

Now the speedo can show you are up to 10% quicker than your real speed but the margin is 0% on showing you are going slower than your real speed.

In the US you often have roads as wide and as straight as an airport runway. You may also have a car that goes off like a rocket, and it doesn't strain your wallet if that acceleration costs you a quart of gas, because fuel is so stinking cheap (yes, it still is!).

In Switzerland , it very often is difficult to pass a slowpoke without significant risk, unless you have some 250 HP under the hood. On Swiss roads, I rather stay behind a crawler for a while than putting my and other people's lives at risk just for arriving at my destination half a minute earlier.

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"This is AMAZING! I have the exact amount of money Joe Biden has cost us playing golf in my sweatpants pocket!" — Kona Lowell

That's exactly why one needs a sufficiently powerful car in this country despite low speed limits and high fines. With all those turns and the almost complete absence of passing lanes one simply needs plenty of power to pass safely.

Take your time man. What you gain is ridiculous compared with the expenses and the risk. I was like you 40 years ago, but I had to learn a lot. Real life can be a slow but good teacher.

Surely I can agree that a satelite guided system will give a more accurately rate of movement. But... I've never seen a car with an inaccurate spedometer unless it was extremely old and had never been calibrated.

...and yet the Germans still drive faster. Shoot... even the French and the Swiss drive faster. Legally anyway.

In the Northeast US, the posted speed limit is 65mph (105kph). As you go south and west it gets faster, up to 70 (113kph) in the Southeast, and I think 75 (120kph) or even 80 (129) in some western states. People speed anyway. Of course, the faster the posted limit, the less tolerance there is.