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DRIVING

Driving in Spain: How to find out if you’ve been fined or points taken off your licence

If you have committed a traffic offence in Spain, you will typically receive a fine or have points taken off your driving licence, but what happens if you don't receive the notifications? Here's how you check.

Published: 22 September 2021 13:27 CEST
Driving in Spain: How to find out if you’ve been fined or points taken off your licence
How to check if you've got points on your licence in Spain. Photo: CESAR MANSO / AFP

If you have committed a traffic offence in Spain, such as speeding, you will usually be fined or have points taken off your driving licence, however sometimes not everyone will receive the notifications and therefore not know when to pay the fine by. 

This could be because you have changed your address and did not update it with the General Directorate of Traffic (DGT), you were travelling at the time, or the notification simply did not arrive.

Even if you weren’t notified, there is a simple way to find out if you have a fine or a point on your licence, which was published in the Official State Gazette (BOE).

READ ALSO: Driving in Spain: The five new fines traffic authorities want to roll out in September

An edict will be published on an electronic bulletin board – the Unique Edictal Board of the BOE (TEU), where you will be able to look up any points taken off your licence or recent fines. You can access it HERE.

Access to the TEU is free for all residents in Spain and you can consult the notice board whenever you want, in order to stay up to date with the penalties and other traffic violations you may have committed.  

To see if you appear in the edicts published in the TEU, you need to access the DGT’s electronic headquarters. To this, you won’t need your digital certificate but will need to enter your ID details, such as NIE, TIE or similar.  

READ ALSO: Access all areas: how to get a digital certificate in Spain to aid online processes

“In case that the address of the offender is unknown, the law also establishes that the notification of the sanction can be done by publishing the details on the TEU”, the BOE states. 

After the notification has been published on the TEU for 20 days, the law considers that notification has been made and the procedure has been completed.  

The publication will be available on the BOE website for a further three months, after that period the notification details will only be accessible by means of a verification code, the CVE, which you must request from the DGT. 

The Driver Safety e-mail Address – DEV

Another easy way to check is by signing up to Driver Safety e-mail Address or DEV. The DEV is an electronic notification system, which was created to contact vehicle owners by e-mail instead of by post.

You can register for this on the DGT website HERE. Once you are registered for this service, you will stop receiving paper notifications and will only get digital ones instead.

This means that won’t need to worry if you do not receive a paper notification in time. You will also receive an SMS every time you receive a digital notification on the system, meaning that you’ll know exactly when you’ve received an e-mail too. 

The electronic system allows you to prove the date and time you received the notification and when you opened it, proving that you’ve actually received it.

If the notification is sent to the DEV and you do not access it within 10 days, the notification will be considered as rejected and they may try to contact you via other means or it may be published on the TEU. 

Even if you sign up to the DEV, the DGT stresses that it’s still important that you update all your details with them, including your current postal address.

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DRIVING

‘Città 30’: Which Italian cities will bring in new speed limits?

Bologna has faced heavy criticism - including from the Italian government - after introducing a speed limit of 30km/h, but it's not the only city to approve these rules.

Published: 23 January 2024 15:12 CET
'Città 30': Which Italian cities will bring in new speed limits?

Bologna on January 17th became Italy’s first major city to introduce a speed limit of 30km/h on 70 percent of roads in the city centre under its ‘Città 30’ plan, first announced in 2022, and initially set to come into force by June 2023.

The move made Bologna one of a growing number of European cities, including Paris, Madrid, Brussels, and Bilbao, to bring in a 30km/h limit aimed at improving air quality and road safety.

But the change was met last week with a go-slow protest by Bologna’s taxi drivers and, perhaps more surprisingly, criticism from the Italian transport ministry, which financed the measure.

Matteo Salvini, who is currently serving as Italy’s transport minister, this week pledged to bring in new nationwide rules dictating speed limits in cities that would reverse Bologna’s new rule.

Salvini’s League party has long criticised Bologna’s ‘Città 30’ plan, claiming it would make life harder for residents as well as people working in the city and would create “more traffic and fines”.

OPINION: Italians and their cars are inseparable – will this ever change?

Bologna’s speed limit has sparked a heated debate across Italy, despite the increasingly widespread adoption of such measures in many other cities in Europe and worldwide in recent years.

While Bologna is the biggest Italian city to bring in the measure, it’s not the first – and many more local authorities, including in Rome, are now looking to follow their example in the next few years.

Some 60 smaller cities and towns in Italy have adopted the measure so far, according to Sky TG24, though there is no complete list.

This compares to around 200 French towns and cities to adopt the rule, while in Spain the same limit has applied to 70 percent of all the country’s roads since since May 2021 under nationwide rules, reports LA7.

The first Italian town to experiment with a 30 km/h speed limit was Cesena, south of Bologna, which introduced it in 1998. Since then, the local authority has found that serious accidents have halved, while the number of non-serious ones has remained unchanged.

Olbia, in Sardinia, also famously introduced the speed limit in 2021.

The city of Parma is planning to bring in the same rules from 2024, while the Tuscan capital of Florence approved five 30km/h zones in the city centre earlier this month.

Turin is set to bring in its first 30km/h limits this year as part of its broader plan to improve transport infrastructure, aimed at reducing smog and increasing livability.

READ ALSO: Why electric cars aren’t more popular in Italy

Meanwhile, the mayor of Rome, Roberto Gualtieri, has promised to introduce the limit on 70 percent of the capital’s roads by the end of his mandate, which expires in 2026.

In Milan, while the city council has voted in favour of lower speed limits and other traffic limitations on central roads, it’s not clear when these could come into force.

Milan mayor Beppe Sala this week said a 30 km/h limit would be “impossible” to implement in the Lombardy capital.

And it’s notable that almost all of the cities looking at slowing down traffic are in the north or centre-north of Italy.

There has been little interest reported in the measures further south, where statistics have shown there are a higher number of serious road accidents – though the total number of accidents is in fact higher in the north.

According to the World Health Organisation the risk of death to a pedestrian hit by a car driven at 50 km/h is 80 percent. The risk drops to 10 percent at 30 km/h.

The speed limit on roads in Italian towns and cities is generally 50, and on the autostrade (motorways) it’s up to 130.

Many Italian residents are heavily dependent on cars as their primary mode of transport: Italy has the second-highest rate of car ownership in Europe, with 670 vehicles per 1,000 residents, second only to Luxembourg with 682, according to statistics agency Eurostat.

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