dodgy parking fines

tgot · April 2010

Just wondered if anyone else has had any problems with parking fines (apart from getting them of course..) being given but not actually left on the car?

I got a parking fine last week on Ferme Park Road but all they left was a yellow plastic cover with no actual parking fine inside, meaning i had to chase it up to find out the details in order to pay before the fine went up. Just thought they were being a bit slack.

But then the plot thickened...
Got a letter last night saying i had another parking fine which I hadn't paid - hence the fine had doubled - for leaving one wheel on the pavement (bastards...)in a parking bay a month ago. But strangely (or not) I didn't actually ever have a parking fine left on my windscreen so had no knowledge of this.

If it was a one-off, fair cop, but to have 2 fines in one month disappear could suggest they are either being totally rubbish at their jobs or are deliberately giving fines then not leaving them so you end up paying double..

am i being overly cynical? have obviously written to them and they've just sent back details of the fines and a photo, but not actually answered how their officers are so rubbish

do i need to get out more? perhaps in the car to somewhere with less parking attendants..

jsut wondered if anyone had experienced the same..

Papa · April 2010

That's bad luck, my advice would be to challenge every time, If you write to the council and explain that you did not get the ticket, then as a matter of course they should let you pay the lower fine and also give you the opportunity to send in an informal appeal at the lower fine level (as they would if you'd had the ticket.) Ask for photographic evidence that the offence occurred and if they send it check for faults. Also check to make sure all signs and markings are correct - if they aren't you can get the ticket rescinded. How much of a wheel did you have on the pavement? Do you know this actually happened? Always question and demand proof, because the system actively tries to rip you off. If you have a reasonable appeal and the council turns it down, appeal formally and then if you still aren't satisfied go to the parking adjudicator, which tends to err on the side of common sense. This may sound a bit long-winded and paranoid, but I've had too many parking tickets unfairly given to tolerate the current system. And also challenging tickets, if you can find good reason, is usually quite successful.

john-of-the-jungle · April 2010

I've had recent experience, in a different way, of dodgy parking fines. We have a residents permit, but parked in a bay on Evershot Road that is for business permit holders and payndisplay most of the time, except on match days when residents can use it (probably). At least that's what Islington says, but the sign is so confusing it would take a PhD in the logic of parking signs to interpret (and I ain't got one). Four days later we had four tickets. The objection process worked, sort of, and they reduced the four tickets to two @£60. Still, £120 is a lot of dosh to fork out for nothing. It took the council 4 lengthy paragraphs to explain the logic of the sign: I rest my case. (I copied our councillor in on the correspondence but no finger has been lifted - useless sod probably thinks he has better things to do than attend to tight-fisted moaners like me.) PapaL is right: if in doubt, object.

graeme · April 2010

Agree, object.

Have had a ticket cancelled as they didn't have the colour of my car correct, though I was accidentally in a pay&display bay with a residents permit.

Also had my car towed outside Highbury on a match day, with a resident's permit on it. When I called the car pound they had no record of my car, so I reported it stolen. It never turned up, several calls to the pound were fruitless. Then 2 months later I got a letter from Islington council saying they'd impounded my car (on the date it was stolen) and I'd be due £1200 in storage fees. Erk. Anyway, my police report pre-empted their paperwork, and I got the car back for nothing - 2 months after they stole it, with a busted headlight.

Dafties.

Ian · April 2010

I got a ticket when I first moved to Stroud Green because I looked at the sign and mentally inserted a comma between "business permit" and "ISJ". I assumed that as I had an ISJ that when it said ISJ I could park in that spot. After all any sensible system would have a different name for the permit for business than residents, so it was pretty obvious that my ISJ was OK here ... Still think it is stupid that they don't have ISBJ or somesuch for the business permit to make it obviously different to a resident's permit. Bet they get a lot of people once with this system.

Papa · April 2010

The irony, of course, is that we all appear to be local residents and the whole point of a CPZ is meant to be to benefit local residents not hammer them and their guests. Also, ever wondered why it costs so much each year for a permit? £70 a year for an average car. After all, once you put the signs up and paint the lines (which was done a long time ago), a CPZ has no real running costs. The tickets cover the cost of the traffic wardens. Nice little earner, isn't it? Oh, and why for those of us who live within a match day boundary, don't we get free visitor permits to make up for all the extra Emirates events days they are now holding, like concerts and Brazil games etc? Arsenal games, fair enough. They were here first, but Brazil games and Bruce Springsteen concerts, that's just money making. Sorry, rant over.

twinspark · April 2010

This is the org. to contact with parking and ticket probs.

www.parkingandtrafficappeals.gov.uk

@Papa L. all parking schemes are just money making disguised as a saving-the-planet-tax. Nothing to do with being green however.

leiba1 · April 2010

I'm sure that they sometimes make up these tickets, in fact I know they do. I drive a Honda 90 (pizza type bike) and one Xmas eve through the post I got the non payed, now double fine parking ticket letter. There had been no ticket on my bike. This was probably because it wasn't my bike that had supposedly been parked on the pavement, chained to a lampost outside #67. (I live at #85) As it was holiday time their office was closed so I waited until the new year to contest the ticket. On new years eve another non payed double fine letter arrived. This time I was supposedly parked in the road on double yellow lines on the outside of a bend next to a traffic island outside #93. I wrote to them and asked them to use their coomon sense to explain why I would park outside #67 when I had a perfectly good lampost outside my own home. I also asked them about the stupidity of parking my bike in such a vulnerable place as outside #93 pointing out that being such a small vehicle I could almost park it anywhere and most definately closer to home. I sent in photos of both sites and included a photo of where my bike is parked when I'm at home.... off road and in my front yard.
A week or so later I saw a couple of guys with clipboards and cameras inspecting both sites and my place and soon after that I got a standard letter saying that on this occassion they would not be pursuing the matter any further. No explanation, no apology. And I still wonder if that traffic warden was reprimanded (should have been sacked) for making a false statement.

ADGS · April 2010

On the contrary, the wardens who get in trouble are generally the ones who don't issue enough fines. 'Legitimacy' is a distant second place to the prospect of more tickets = more £££. It's our own little glimpse of how law enforcement works in third world juntas.

Papa · April 2010

I like the reactionary tone this thread is taking The spread of Controlled Parking Zones throughout the country is one of the most disturbing sign of the times things in my view. The self-interest push by faceless bureaucrats interested in maintaining and growing empires to keep their fiefdom; the inability of the population to realise the proliferation problem that once you put one in you just have to continue, the lack of realisation that all you need to do to stop commuter parking is have a one to two hour properly enforced restriction in the middle of the day; the failure to rise up against something purporting to be for your own good but quite clearly not; the fact that you aren't allowed to park in my empty road between 8.30am and 6.30pm six days a week. Drives me mad. Who would have thunk it that Stroud Green Road would become the boundary between two rical juntas chasing money at the expense of legitimacy, while spinning lies about common sense left right and centre? Remember you may not have a car or a friend with a car, but if you allow others to be treated like this, one day they will treat you the same too.

Arkady · April 2010

The middle-of-the-day restriction idea sounds like a good one to me. On the other hand I have some sympathy with anything that discourages the use of cars in urban areas.

Brodiej · April 2010

@ john of the jungle

I had exactly the same issue. I own a ISJ permit, but got done for going in a business bay. It was lashing down with rain at the time and the sign just looked like ISJ so i thought it was fine. I made the same comments to the council that the sign wasn't clear, and the fact that other people have had the same issue suggests thats true. The fact that they will never seek to change it demonstrates to me that this is a massive money making scheme.

On another note, my girlfriend lives in Queens Park, and she gave me a book of parking permits that cost her about 50p each per day, maybe less. She can have unlimited amounts. We get 10 per year and they're 6 quid each. I had some builders in for 10 days and its wiped my entire allocation for the year. Crazy. I wrote to the council to complain about the costs and inflexibility.......no reply. It absolutely makes my blood boil. Easy election vote gainer......stop making money out of local residents through parking restrictions and fines.

graeme · April 2010

Running a council department is far too much trouble in itself to bother responding to residents legitimate concerns. When will you idiots learn?!

Love,
M Hodge.

dorothy · April 2010

I had no idea Islington were so hard on parking, @Brodiej. I think it's completely unacceptable. I thought it was bad enough in Haringey, but they seem to be more flexible now. At least we can get two week long passes for builders, as well as weekend and all day ones. The yearly permit is much cheaper too.

Recently I've been completing the form wrongly asking for more vouchers with a corresponding cheque. They normally ring me, point out the error and then say they'll let it go, and give me more.

Papa · April 2010

Arkady, discouraging people uneccessarily using cars is good, I agree. But cars don't pollute when they are parked. Think of all that extra poison being pumped into the air by drivers going round and round trying to find a spot to park, or looping round while people run into shops rather than just simply parking. Taking a look at our clogged up roads combined with ultra stringent parking restrictions, the evidence points to them not stopping people driving, they just prevent people parking and make money for the Man. Also, why is Stroud Green / Finsbury Park the only part of Islington with 8.30 to 6.30pm restrictions six days a week? Madness. As much as I love the area, if Upper St can make do with restrictions until 1.30pm on Saturdays, then I think we could too. (And it's not because of Arsenal because we have extra restrictions for that too).

twinspark · April 2010

Agree with Papa L. and unfortunately driving cars slowly increases the level of emissions, so 20mph and speed bumps work contra to Haringey and Islingtions claims of No Emission Zones. The thing is motorists are a disparate bunch, not well organised and with fitful representation by the RAC,AA or whatever - ergo easy to tax directly or indirectly which is what resident permits, parking meters, different levels of road tax etc.all are.[not to mention fuel taxes, speed cameras etc. ] The likelihood of taxing people out of their cars is remote - not least because driving can be great fun. The correct target since the early '70's or whenever could and should have been the car manufacturers and oil companies to amend their products accordingly.[ Honda had an emission free engine in1972 that never progressed to mass production - Japanese cars were viewed rather differently back then and the industry lobby - i.e US pressure killed it] Now of course we have the bitter irony of oil companies morphing into our 'guardians' and cornering the market in renewables in a transition strategy which has seen them map future profits from 'new' fuels whilst still raking it in from traditional ones. [ which is why Texas has siloes full of four year old grain as the owners wait for the price to rise] I don't buy the oil co's arguments about re-investment in infrastructure - that's a cost of their business. Couple of queries to end on.
Why do oil prices increase when demand increases?
[ contra to basic economic theory]
When was the last time an oil company made a loss or just broke even?

ActionVerb · April 2010

@twinspark - deman increasing = price of oil going up is not contradictory to basic economic theory. If supply were to increase then price will theoretically decrease. In reality however OPEC have control of a significant proportion of the world's oil, and can regulate supply and therefore control the price of a barrel.

andy · April 2010

To answer the last point, oil companies get paid a pretty much fixed $ per barrel amount for lots of their revenue, which leaves the producing country (e.g. Saudi) taking the price risk. So they're don't lose when the price falls, but they do well when the price goes ok.

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