Bay watch

Mr Mustard doesn't understand the sort of people who park in bays reserved for blue badge holders. The excuse that there are many fraudulent holders (which there are) does not condone parking in a bay as the next person to need it might be someone with crutches who has extreme mobility problems. Mr Mustard notes that someone else was interested in this subject as they asked questions about it and the answers were in the Barnet Council disclosure log.

The questions were how many people were charged for parking in disabled bays and how much money did that raise in the years 2007 to 2011. The council know how many tickets they issued for offence code 40 "Parked in a disabled bay without clearly displaying a valid disabled person's badge" but amazingly they don't record income by contravention code. Mr Mustard has no idea why not as every payment has to be allocated to a parking ticket.

So here are the figures

2007	1,778
2008	2,186
2009	2,016
2010	1,301
2011	2,270

Taking 300 days as the likely annual number on which borough wide enforcement takes place we see that the number of tickets issued each day varies from about 4 to 7 which doesn't seem like many. A number of these will actually have been to blue badge holders who made an administrative error, forgot to put the time wheel out or put the badge the wrong way up and not every transgressor gets caught, of course.

Anyway, the number is interestingly low but let's see if we can get it down near zero.

Please keep out of disabled bays unless you have a valid blue badge.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard