Parking ticket

hollydays

pay-you have breached parking regulations.

Stonk

Ivenofinmoney wrote:

Does anyone know for sure which of these statements are true ?? If Catch A Fire is correct, then it can't hurt to chance my arm.

I'm fairly sure that when I was in this situation with Barnet council a few years ago, it was specifically stated that by appealing I would lose the right to pay the discounted fine. I remember mentioning how unfair this was in my letter of appeal. (Not that anyone read a single word of that letter - all I got was a bog-standard reply which corresponded to nothing I had written).

I'm glad to hear this has changed now (or that I was mistaken). Maybe it was because of the aforementioned chap who argued it was against human rights.

grilli

Freebie_Hunter wrote:

Double yellow lines are there for a reason - usually for safety. If your partner was parked on a narrower piece of road or perhaps near a corner then she could well have jeopardised someones life had an emergency services vehicle needed to get through.

They often put them down if there simply isn't the room to create a space so you'd have been shouting louder had your partner come out and find her door taken off in the morning!

It takes all of 10 minutes to park legally

the road we lived on was not a narrow road nor was it parked in a dangerous place, it was purely because she had driven 5 hours late at night to our house from the north west to wales with 2 kids who were tired and hungry. the only parking for our house is on the opposite side of the road which was full, the nearest space was about 2 streets away and the safety of the car was more important i suppose, the surrounding area was well known for car thefts and damage. lesson learnt, anyway, bought house with driveway now lol.

tenuissent

My most upsetting parking fine was on Hastings seafront. I bought a permit, put it in the correct place, my son and I closed the car doors and left. On our return, the ticket had vanished and we had a parking fine of £60 (usual reduction if promptly paid). I can only think that it blew away as we closed our doors, and although we searched thoroughly, we never found it. I appealed immediately but it was no good. Had to pay. BUT the time to pay the fine in was extended as described above.

Incidentally: a woman nearby had some time on her ticket and willingly gave it to me as she left so that I could say I had had a permit all the time (as I had), but I didn't dare use it. Anyway, they would only have said it had not been correctly displayed.

More interesting is an experience in Tunbridge Wells: the permit I bought from a machine came out blank. I put it on the dashboard anyway, with a note to say when I had arrived and how much I had paid. Got a fine!

I wrote immediately to appeal, sending photocopies of all the parking permits I had bought there for several weeks (scrabbled around on the floor of my thankfully untidy car) in order to show that I was not in the habit of evading parking fees, and was excused the fine, NOT because the original ticket had been blank, but because I had supplied "documentary proof" of my custom and practice.

Moral: if you appeal against a parking fine, find something, whatever, to send with your appeal.

RedOnRed

When I used to have to drive into London every day I got about £400 in parking fines in my first year!

Getting towed away was the worst. The car was taken and you don't know whether it's stolen or what, or even where it's gone. That cost me £142 to get back and that was 8 years ago!

I could put little flags all over central London of where I was done.

Around the same time my car was broken into and not one person came and investigated or was interested, but park harmlessly somewhere for a couple of minutes on a couple of yellow lines and I would be heavily fined and penalised.

When honest people are being so over zealously penalised and persecuted you have to question the imbalance, the fairness and downright outrageousness of it.

tenuissent

Another traffic warden problem, again in Hastings: my son's car was stolen, trashed and dumped in a no parking area. Being a bit dozy (ill, in fact), he didn't notice it had gone from a nearby street where he parked it (legally) until he received notice of mounting fines. He delayed doing anything about it until the council towed it away and crushed it without warning. Then he told me and I wrote to the parking people to explain - but they wouldn't cancel the fine.

On the basis that I described above, that if you appeal against a parking fine, find something, whatever, to send with your appeal, I appealed again, sending them the addresses and phone numbers of the police and the council who had been involved in disposing of the car - and heard no more.

The maddening thing here was that I had just paid for new tyres and the road tax disk, and we had no opportunity to salvage at least that, now that the car was crushed.