December 04, 2003
Extraneous Centimos
Category: Transit
Barcelona: Barcelona's otherwise fantastic metro-system offers a rather curious fine if you are caught smoking: 30 Euros and 5 Cents. Why the 5 cents? It probably costs more than 5 cents per fine in administrative fluff to deal with the change!
Posted by Nick at December 4, 2003 07:38 PM
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I'd hazard a guess that the fine was simply converted from pesetas to euros without rounding up or down.
Roman subway fares are similar. Very inconvenient if you don't have a lot of small change on you. I guess for some reason they didn't want to change the fares when the Euro changeover occurred.
One obvious reason would be to avoid accusations of concealing a increase in the fare (or fine) in the changeover.
It's also possible that changing the fine would require altering a municpal bylaw or something.
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I'd hazard a guess that the fine was simply converted from pesetas to euros without rounding up or down.
Posted by: David Frazer on December 6, 2003 06:28 PM