Happy New Year from Barnet Council

Mr Mustard reads random decisions on the parking PCN tribunal website. When he saw one was for 1 January 24 he took a look.

 

This is the road in question

As it is within a controlled parking zone, for which you pass zone entry signs as you exit the A5, the single yellow sign is 400m away around a corner and the hours are 9:30am to 4:30pm on Mondays to Saturdays (including bank holidays).

 

Thus the single yellow was in force but Mr Mustard suspects that many motorists wouldn't understand (time to learn which you are doing now).

 

What the adjudicator could have allowed on, if the motorist had raised it as an argument, is that because of the obvious inference that it is ok to park outside of the zig zag hours, is that the single yellow should have its own sign in accordance with guidance.

The role of the adjudicator is to decide upon the arguments placed in front of them although they will sometimes pick up council errors of their own volition.

 

That is the reason why every motorist should learn all they can about PCNs as with Mr Mustard's help this PCN might have been defeated.

 

Mr Mustard decided to ask Barnet Council a few questions about PCNs issued on 1 January as it isn't a day when there is likely to be much requirement for traffic management, with many motorists beached on the sofa watching the TV, and so he expected numbers to be lower (spoiler alert, they weren't).

Here are the questions and the response:

Mr Mustard was grateful for the hint that the Open Data portal had been brought up to date as it had not been updated for years (the income part is still two years behind).

Mr Mustard then extracted the data for himself, and broke it down by contravention type:

What we see is that for traffic wardens, 1 January is just another day, they can fill their non-existent quota of tickets (giving out zero PCNs during an 8 hour shift would probably lead to the sack after a difficult conversation with your supervisor) by focussing on specific contraventions.

In order to make up for not being able to issue PCNs to cars parked in residents bays and pay to park locations the daily amount of PCNs is made up by people making innocent errors on single yellow lines on a day when it doesn't really matter. You know what to do on bank holidays, park in residents and pay-to-park bays and car parks.

The end.