Hoping someone can give me a little background on what to expect.

Mid-May we drove from southwest France to Geneva in two small rental cars. We were eager to return our one-way rentals to the airport as soon as possible and planned to do it early the next day (a Sat morning.) We are staying in a rental apt. in the Servette area and it's connected to a small commercial center. I could not tell what the parking situation was, other than that there were blue lines on things but we knew no one, don't speak French yet, and there was a hodge-podge of cars already parked there.

I saw a man coming out of a small restaurant with boxes and tried to ask him if we would be allowed to leave our cars there overnight. He actually understood me and said "yes" with the proviso that they'd be gone in the morning (I told him between 9-10.)

So I felt as confident as is possible. Then it poured like crazy all night. The next AM I went out to check on the cars and both had soggy, unreadable tickets on them. But tickets nevertheless.

I bundled them both up, wrote a long letter (in English) explaining the situation and sent them off to the address on the ticket.

I've now learned from my mother in the States that SHE'S received a ltr in French and that it appears to be about the two tickets! (Her address is our temporary US mailing address and would have been what was listed on our rental car contracts.)

She's sending it back our way but I would love some sense for how this might be handled - if anyone else has run into a situation where it's related to parking, to rental cars, and misinformed renters!

I won't know until the letter makes it back here whether we're in "trouble" or how painful the fees might be but the anxiety in advance is killing me. I've seen other suggestions online that rental car agencies may well pick up the cost but I find that hard to believe -- that's quite a costly liability potentially.

Anyone ease my panic?!

Blue line parking is time-limited between 0730 and 1930. Failure to respect time limitation and/or display the parking disc showing what hour you arrived at entails a 40 CHF fine.

They may very well pick it up and charge it to your credit card adding a chunky processing fee on top.

Aha - thanks. Good info to know.

I guess the big question next will be whether the letter that arrived in the States was from the cantonal folks or from the rental car company (in this case, EuropCar, which I've already had reason to be underwhelmed with.) If the latter, then you may well be right that I'll be double-dinged. If the former, then hopefully we can unbury this fast and pay off the two matching tickets.

There was a really happy ending to this which I failed to post last month.

I received the ltr from the States which, sure enough, said I needed to pay the two tickets. The letter was clearly not a form letter, which on some weird level I appreciated. The only address on it was what I think might be the Geneva equivalent of a subcontractor who handles aging tickets.

I took the bus out to the light industrial area that the "security agency" had their office. Had my 9 yr old with me on a scooter. The lobby was very hush-quiet and there was a window for people to go up to. I explained in my hack French what the situation was and that I wanted to pay the tickets immediately and I sussed out that in fact I needed to go to the gendarmerie (sp? word?) or the equiv. in a different commune in order to pay. rats. But it was our fault for not knowing the law to begin with...

I whipped out my handy bus map and asked for some help in figuring out the connections. The woman did her best and then someone else in her office got involved and then before I knew it, she'd come back to the office and indicated that we didn't need to worry about it anymore. And she smiled.

I was so confused I asked her about three different ways but it turned out that they had indeed taken care of the tickets for us. I think our interest in being honest and taking care of it all pronto worked on our behalf! It was the most unexpected and pleasant surprise of our time here thus far. (And I thanked her profusely...)

Viva la Suisse! (or did I just mix up two languages and a proper noun?)

Great story, thanks for sharing

The burning question is

- if you park at 10AM, and your time widget reads 10AM, how long can you reste la / stay there.
- is it true that it is not enforced at lunch ... 12-1:30PM?

Ask 5 people in Lausanne, get 5 answers.

- If you arrive at 10:00 am, you have to set the disc dial to: 10:30 and you have to depart before: 11:30 am.

- If you arrive at 9:59 am, you have to set the disc dial to: 10:00 and you have to depart before: 11:00 am.

No, that's not true!

- If you arrive between 11:30 am and 1:29 pm, you are allowed to stay until 2:30 pm (you have to depart before 2:30 pm).

- If a car arrived at 11:15 am, it has to depart before 12:30 pm. If a parking enforcement officer sees that this car is still there at 12:50 pm, s/he will issue a ticket!


That's because the rules are a little bit tricky!