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Dark forces are at work within Barnet Council.
In order to meet parking ticket number expectations, (targets by any other name) NSL's traffic wardens roam the streets at night on their scooters looking for people who have parked on the pavement or across a dropped kerb.
The above is a sample of a parking ticket photograph taken after 9pm.
There is a prize if you can tell me the make of the car or the road this photograph was taken in.
Do you suppose that the independent adjudicator will regard this evidence as adequate as Mr Mustard somehow doubts it.
It is all very well for naughty motorists to get tickets but roaming the borough at night looking for minor or non-existent transgressions will slowly but surely drive motorists against the traffic wardens, the council and NSL and no good will come of it. Every unfair parking ticket loses the goodwill of the motorist.
How desperate the council must be for cash.
Yours frugally
Mr Mustard
Parking controls and penalties should be a useful and transparent mechanism for rationing the use of scarce parking spaces. They should balance the competing needs and use of public roads, pavements and other spaces for the mutual benefit of us as citizens.
ReplyDeleteCitizens who, at different times, and at different points in our lives may sometimes be drivers - including as residents and local business people or service staff. And/or pedestrians, cyclists, parents, children, joggers, strollers, and loungers.
Parking controls do sometimes help to achieve this balance. But rarely without also turning into a means of tax-gathering - screwing millions out of us citizens which is in no sense justified by the statutory requirement that a local council's parking account must not be run at a loss.
In case of any doubt, Haringey, my own local Council, states with complete candour, the statutory guidance. “Authorities should never use parking charges just to raise revenues or as a local tax”. Heaven forfend that such a thought would even cross the minds of our beloved Council Leaders.
But equally we are legally bound not to run the Parking Account at a loss. So entirely in the pursuit of this virtuous outcome we do tend to accrue a trifling and unavoidable surplus which we spend – again entirely legally - on transport related objectives.
Currently in Haringey, our small overshoot – please let’s not call it a profit – is approaching the very modest sum of £6 million p.a.
Alan Stanton
Tottenham Hale ward councillor