Crackdown on illegal parking as council take control

For years drivers in North Somerset have parked illegally without the fear of finding a parking ticket. However the council has now taken over enforcement of double yellow lines and disabled bays from the police.

 

The council is hoping a clampdown on the streets of the streets of Weston-super-Mare, Clevedon and Portishead will free up spaces for people who genuinely need them.

One wheelchair user said, "sometimes when you go into places like supermarkets, and people have parked in there, if you do go and tackle them, they can be quite abusive."

The wardens here have spent the last two weeks handing out over a thousand (blue) warning notices to people that have been parked illegally.

If the equivalent number of £70 fines were to have been given out, it could have netted up to £70,000 for the council.

 

Allan Taylor, Parking Services Manager for North Somerset Council, said "Invariably, we will be giving out more fines but I think very quickly the public will change their behaviour."

"Very shortly we will have places available for loading bays, for lorry drivers, for people to unload, disabled bays for disabled people and no parking where it could be dangerous or hold up traffic."

In the first few hours of the new enforcement rules, the team has issued 50 £70 fines. The council says it's a small price to pay for keeping these roads clear.

 

Court orders woman to pay £24,500 to private parking company

Story Source BBC Tayside and central Scotland

A woman has been ordered to pay a private parking company £24,500 in unpaid charges.

Carly Mackie ignored hundreds of parking tickets claiming that they were unenforceable. The tickets were for leaving her car at Dundee's Waterfront without a permit.

Ms Mackie said that she had a right to park in the area as she was living at a flat with her stepfather, who was a tenant and had a garage at the property.

Sheriff George Way said the charges were from a "valid contract" and she was liable for them.

Vehicle Control Services (VCS) took the 28-year-old to court last year after she failed to pay £18,500 in private parking notices.
 
Sheriff Way said Ms Mackie had parked outside the garage and would not accept the offer of a parking permit for a space nearby for £40 per month.

What does the law say?

Parking tickets issued by private companies in private car parks are not fines, they can be classed as parking charge notices. These are different from Penalty Charge Notices which are issued by council traffic wardens and the police. These are regulated fines, backed by legislation.

Private landowners and car parking firms do not have the power to issue Penalty Charge Notices
However, by parking in a restricted private area, a motorist can be considered to be agreeing to a contract with the landowner or car park operator, provided there is adequate signage warning of the charge.Failing to pay can be seen as a breach of contract and the car parking firm can take the motorist to court to recover their losses.


The sheriff said Ms Mackie had "entirely misdirected herself" on both the law and "the contractual chain" in the case.

He said: "The defender is bound by that contract and incurred the parking charge on each occasion.
"The defender refused to pay the parking charges not because she was unaware of the parking scheme or the terms of the notices or the financial consequences of parking at any time, but because she did not believe that the charges were valid in law.

"The parking charges flow from a valid contract between the pursuers and the defender and she is liable for them."

UK drivers could soon be fined £70 for parking on pavements

DRIVERS who mount kerbs and park on pavements could soon be hit with a £70 fine.

London has had a ban on parking on pavements since 1974, the practise is still completely legal in the rest of country.

But the Local Government Association hopes to change this by asking the Government to give councils powers to enforce a ban that could see drivers prevented from parking on any part of the pavement, including kerbs.

Streets are becoming dangerously congested and pedestrians are being forced to step out into the street to get round parked vehicles. This is particularly dangerous for blind or partially sighted people and mums and dads with prams.

 

How does the pavement parking ban in London work?

Parking on pavements has been banned in London since the 1974 Greater London Council (General Powers) Act.

The act forbids motorists to park on urban roads in the capital with their car’s wheels resting on footways, grass verges or land between carriageways. There are exceptions to this rule in some areas.

These are clearly marked with special blue parking signs, showing a car with one wheel on the kerb.
Other times, parking bays drawn out with white lines extending onto footways to show that parking there is permitted.

In areas where it is not allowed, the law provides protection for certain circumstances, such as drivers who are unloading goods, putting out a fire or saving someone’s life. Those who break the rules can be subject to a fine.

The Law Says:

 Pavements are for people to walk on. Vehicles parked on the footway can cause an obstruction and inhibit the independence of many vulnerable people, especially older or disabled people with visual or mobility impairments. And when pedestrians, for example families with pushchairs, are forced into the road and into oncoming traffic, pavement parking is simply dangerous. Pavements are not designed to carry the weight of vehicles, and the added maintenance cost of repairing cracked and damaged paving adds an unnecessary financial burden to already cash-strapped councils.

'Do it yourself' ticketing phone app pays £10 bounty to users who take pictures of car parked wrongly

A parking firm is offering people a tenner to shop drivers using a phone app.
The firm which operates car parks for McDonalds, Halfords, Tesco and the NHS is handing out a £10 commission to increase parking “fines” dished out to hard-pressed drivers.

All users have to do is take and upload a picture of the parked car to UK Car Park Management, along with its registration number.

Until now firms such as this have relied on employing their own private traffic wardens or installing Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) cameras.

It is the latest move by the money-spinning private parking industry which has been criticised for making huge sums from motorists over minor driving misdemeanours.
Defiant CPM boss James Randall, 32, said: “The problem is not with the app but with drivers that do not respect people’s land.
“The photo uploaded to the app is just the evidence and every one is looked at by a member of staff before a ticket is printed.”

Users of the app are given “complete confidentiality” when using the app to report drivers and claim £10 for every paid ticket.

Offending drivers are sent a letter demanding £60, which rises to £100 after 14 days without payment.

The “quick and discreet” service lets any land or business owner register online and allows them or their staff to start dishing out their own parking charges.

The RAC has blasted the scheme as a “recipe for disaster” and could lead to fights between drivers and app users photographing their vehicles.

RAC spokesman Simon Williams said: “This is wrong on so many levels it beggars belief.
“The sharp practices of parking companies are already regularly called into question with paid officials dishing out fines, but with members of the public being financially encouraged to shop motorists who overstay, it’s a recipe for disaster.

“This will cause total chaos by undermining trust still further and may even lead to public order offences between drivers and members of the public looking to earn a quick £10.”
Edmund King, president of the AA, said: “We hoped that outlawing cowboy clampers would have got rid of these sharp practices but it seems that some of the modern day highwaymen are alive and well.

CPM was founded in September 2010 by managing director James Randall, aged 32, and sales director Lukhbir ‘Lucky’ Gohler, aged 31.

(Photo: Dave Hill / Daily Mirror)

RAC spokesman Simon Williams added: “This can only be seen as a cost-cutting move from a private parking company trying to reduce its employee overheads by incentivising the public to do the job instead.

“Surely this private parking company’s fees and fines are high enough to merit proper employees.”
Official-looking parking ‘charges’ on private land of usually around £100 are not legal fines but a bill for breach of contract.

CPM offers its “free” services to residential and commercial landowners by pocketing cash levied to motorists.

Prime Minister Theresa May has been blamed for the law change which unleashed the multi- million pound industry while serving as Home Secretary. Her Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 enabled private parking firms to launch civil cases against a registered keeper via the County Courts in England - even if they could not prove who was driving a vehicle.

The law spawned soaring numbers of private parking firms requesting information from the DVLA so they can chase motorists for fines.

Before then such tickets could be ignored.

Around four million records of vehicle details were handed to parking companies between 2016 and 2017 by the DVLA which pockets £10 million a year in return for them.

 For more in depth information please go to Source: mirror.co.uk

Chatbot lawyer overturns 160,000 parking tickets in London and New York

Free service DoNotPay helped appeal over $4m in parking fines in just 21 months,  19-year-old Joshua Browder built the bot after receiving “countless” parking tickets himself.

An artificial-intelligence lawyer chatbot has successfully contested 160,000 parking tickets across London and New York for free, showing that chatbots can actually be useful.

Dubbed as “the world’s first robot lawyer” by its creator, Joshua Browder a London-born second-year Stanford University student , DoNotPay helps users contest parking tickets in an easy to use chat-like interface.

The program first works out whether an appeal is possible through a series of simple questions, such as were there clearly visible parking signs, and then guides users through the appeals process.

The results speak for themselves. In the 21 months since the free service was launched in London and New York, Browder says DoNotPay has taken on 250,000 cases and won 160,000, giving it a success rate of 64%

“I think the people getting parking tickets are the most vulnerable in society. These people aren’t looking to break the law. I think they’re being exploited as a revenue source by the local government,” Browder told Venture Beat.

Browder intends to expand DoNotPay to Seattle next. He also intends to create a service to help people with flight delay compensation, as well as helping the HIV positive understand their rights and acting as a guide for refugees navigating foreign legal systems.

Did The Traffic Warden Troll The Student?

Most of us will be familliar with that feeling as we race back to our car chanting "please don't let me have got a ticket" in our heads over and over having realised that we overstayed our ticket, or on the one day we took a risk because we had no change for the meter.

Finding a parking ticket on your windscreen is a frustrating experience, even if you know you’re in the wrong.

This driver even left a hastily-scrawled handwritten note pleading not to get a ticket. The driver, believed to be a student at the University of Georgia in the US, wrote: ‘Had to park here, very late for test. Please don’t ticket me.’

Source: Reddit

You can sense the desperation – ‘please’ is underlined twice, despite their politeness, the traffic warden failed to grant their request, but also if this image is to be believed failed to show any sympathy whatsoever.

A letter placed by the University of Georgia’s parking services next to the student’s note has its own handwritten message: ‘Hope you failed.’

Of course, there’s no way of knowing if it was the traffic warden who wrote ‘hope you failed’ in the image, which was posted on Reddit.

Even if the ‘warden’s message’ was staged, it just goes to show that not even a polite note will stop you from getting a ticket.

Driver wakes up to £110 parking ticket after council paint disabled bay AROUND his car overnight

Image: SWNS.com

When Matt Armstrong found his car parked in a disabled bay outside his home, he assumed he was the victim of an elaborate prank - because it wasn't there the night before.

Matt had parked his car lawfully on the road outside his south London home before bed, so was stunned to find Lambeth Council had painted the bay around his Renault Clio overnight.

Matt failed to see the funny side as he had been slapped with a whopping £110 fine due to the car being parked illegally.

The bay had been requested for Matt's neighbours husband more than two years previously — unfortunately he died earlier this year and she had called Lambeth council several times to cancel.

He said: "They put in this disabled bay which no one needs, painted it under my back wheels and then gave me a parking ticket.

"What can I do but pay the fine and hope to repeal it. If you don’t pay you get clamped or towed away"

Lambeth council confirmed Mr Armstrong’s fine had been cancelled after the authority was contacted by the Evening Standard.

A spokeswoman said: "We’ll cancel the fixed penalty notice and are investigating why there was some confusion around the marking of the disabled bays."

 For the fuller story and more images please visit mirror.co.uk