There have been a lot of articles that have come to our attention this week about conflicts between parking inspectors, doing their job by the rule book, and affected and perturbed residents and car parkers, saying that ruling by the ‘letter of the law’ without any consideration for circumstance is unreasonable. We’ve found three interesting articles this week that all explore the topic.
1. The first example comes from Exeter in the UK, where a heavily pregnant woman was given a ticket for parking in a space designated for people with children. She was told that “until her baby was born, it was not classed as a baby”, meaning that she illegally parked in the designated zone. Read the full article; ‘Pregnant woman ticketed for parent parking’.
2. The second also comes from the UK, in Lambeth, South London. A sewerage flood in a residential road during the week meant that many flats were submerged in effluent, and roadworks have been in place since, meaning that residents have had no parking spaces, instead parking in the middle of the road. Parking inspectors have attempted several times to ticket the vehicles, and when a tow-truck arrived to remove one of the vehicles, the residents swung into action, blocking the tow-truck with their vehicles until the police arrived. The police promptly told the tow-truck operators to release the car immediately. Victory for the people! Read the full article; ‘People power wins parking fight’.
3. The third example comes from closer to home, from the Gold Coast in Queensland. Councillors have apparently instructed the parking inspectors to turn a blind eye and show leniency to some infringements. Whilst in many cases this is driven by unclear laws that are currently being reviewed, the instruction of councillors to the parking inspectors to issue warning letters in place of fines for areas known for serious lack of parking, or to issue fines only when the parking infringement is a serious safety issue, is a departure from our first two examples! Read the full article; ‘Car parking blind eye’.
What do you think? Letter of the law? Common sense to prevail? Leniency unless a safety issue? Let us know your thoughts through the ‘Post a comment’ link below.