Foot in mouth disease in Barnet

 

Many motorists like to put a wheel on the pavement (footway) when the road is narrow. That is car brain thinking as if the carriageway isn't wide enough for a fire engine to get through you just shouldn't stop there, & not make the pavement harder to navigate for a blind person or someone with a wheelchair or a pram.

Henry Road used to have Chez TonTon on the corner (sadly Eric has retired and no-one else took it over) but the car in this case was down the Lancaster Road end. Mr Mustard looked at the images online on the council computer and couldn't quite believe what he was seeing.

Yes, a perfectly parked car, within a mm or two of the kerb stone. Still room to get through the middle of the carriageway.

The motorist, Mr P, couldn't believe it either and made his own challenge to Barnet Council expecting a swift cancellation and maybe, just maybe, a word of apology. He didn't get either. He got this.

What usually happens next is that Mr Mustard gets instructed, sends a complaint to the parking manager, the PCN gets cancelled, an apology is made and a black mark is added to the APCOA file. However, that was suddenly no longer necessary as Mr P had also submitted a separate complaint which was looked at a few days later and the PCN was then cancelled.

Mr Mustard wonders if you know better than he how the heck the PCN got issued in the first place. It is a bizarre blunder.

Mr Mustard also wonders what is going on in the back office that they can reject a 100% perfect (is that a tautology?) challenge. Has AI been let rip in order to save time and money, AI must be in PCN departments already as they are all about processing oodles of data very quickly, cheaply and hopefully accurately. Do ask the council if you are an AI expert as you will ask the best questions.

The traffic warden and the back office person both need a rollicking but they probably won't get one.

The traffic warden also took this photo which was of a sign in Lancaster Road, so around the corner, which isn't pertinent and may have caused the CEO to get muddled. Advice to CEOs, if you are muddled put your machine away and have a little rest.

The end. 

 

Newham Council are Cheats - #50

 

There has been an awful lot of building work in Westfield Avenue and because of this Mr Mustard can't find the exact location using google street view but wonders if it is the one shown in the below photograph

What we see here is a bay adjacent to two live traffic lanes edged with double yellow lines. As Mr Mustard wrote in a recent blog the double yellow lines apply to the bay in which the two cars are placed which appears by the shape to be designed for vehicles. The double yellow lines should not be there.

What Newham Council claimed in this tribunal case was that the location could be used for picking up and dropping off passengers. To do that one would have to stop on the footway, the driver might even have to leave his vehicle to find his passenger. Should Newham Council have wanted the space to be used for that purpose they should have marked out a bay and provided a sign with the relevant rules. Newham Council didn't provide any photographs of signs at the location about setting down: had they done so they would have proved the area was not footway.

Newham Council have got the lines wrong and provided a dubious explanation about the location, as well as designing an ambiguous layout, Mr Mustard thinks they are cheats.

The end.