"THE big freeze has cost council chiefs more than £700,000 in lost parking revenue in just two weeks, it has emerged."
http://edinburghnews.scotsman.com/topstories/Parking-enforcers-frozen-out-by.6668584.jp
CityCyclingEdinburgh Forum » General Edinburgh
"Parking enforcers frozen out by snow"
(11 posts)-
Posted 14 years ago #
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My heart bleeds for these poor poor traffic wardens. With any luck the snow will melt soon so they can get back to ticketing the good citizens of Edinburgh.
Posted 14 years ago # -
bwahahahahaaaaaahahahahaaahahaaaa
*breath*
aaaaahaahahahaahahahahaaaPosted 14 years ago # -
(checks bag carefully)
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Nope, sorry, I'm all out of sympathies.**polite version for the benefit of the more sensitive forummers ;-)
Posted 14 years ago # -
Do traffic wardens in Edinburgh get commission for the number of bookings? Hopefully not, but if they do then it seems a bit unfair for them while the snow is lying.
Posted 14 years ago # -
It's a sorry situation when a significant source of city income is from fining people who make mistakes, honest or indeed otherwise. Imagine if everyone in Edinburgh parked entirely legally.
Posted 14 years ago # -
Couldn't quite work out from the article how much of this "lost revenue" is from enforcement tickets / tow-aways and how much is from people just not paying at the machines.
As I said on the thread about the £600k bus lane enforcement cameras, it's wrong that the council look on large numbers of such fines as "revenue", particularly where safety or the flow of traffic is concerned (overstaying in a legitemate parking space is different).
In a world where the council was concerned with the smooth and safe flow of traffic around town, they should be aiming to collect nearly nothing from these sources as they should be aiming for a situation where there's close to zero infringement.
Instead they aim to collect a certain amount of revenue and to protect that "revenue stream". It almost creates a situation where it's in the council's interest to allow illegal parking, so they can reap the rewards of fines and fees! What incentive is there in really trying to tackle the root of illegal parking, all that would do would be to cut off the "revenue stream" (at the price of better traffic flow and safer roads).
Posted 14 years ago # -
The problem is, in order to enforce zero infringement you need an overwhelming number of enforcers. Suppose it cost £1m a day to police our streets to the point where nobody parked illegally - would it be worth it?
On the other hand, if there was only one warden illegal parking would be rife, but he'd hardly be able to move for issuing tickets, so "making" many times more than his salary in fines.
Personally I'm in two minds about the use of parking fines as a revenue stream. On the one hand it sits badly to "milk" crime rather than prevent it (especially the most dangerous sort of thing like parking on a double-yellow blind junction corner), but on the other, I'd find it equally silly to spend a huge amount stamping out illegal parking rather than, say, violent drunks in the town centre.
The bus lane cameras have caught me by surprise, I must admit. Normally when a technology arrives which can actually stop infringement it proves just as unpopular with the authorities as drivers (precisely because, I suspect, you have to pay to run it and very few people get fined). Look at average cameras - a set at every motorway junction would completely eliminate speeding on the motorways, but there is no movement in that direction.
So we come back to parking - at the moment the council (effectively) hires another enforcer when the number of people infringing reaches a certain multiplier of their salary. Do we think this value is too low or too high?
(PS. Almost certainly the loss of parking revenue largely comes from the fact that people don't need to pay to park in the bays which are obscured, rather than the fines - surely!)
Posted 14 years ago # -
"(PS. Almost certainly the loss of parking revenue largely comes from the fact that people don't need to pay to park in the bays which are obscured, rather than the fines - surely!)"
I assumed that that was what the loss of revenue was refering to.
Posted 14 years ago # -
"
Foreign drivers leave £445,000 trail of unpaid parking ticketsEDINBURGH city council lost hundreds of thousands of pounds in revenue from parking tickets over the past two years, because they could not trace foreign drivers.
"http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/news/Foreign-drivers-leave-445000-.6675659.jp
Posted 14 years ago # -
trail
if it's a trail, surely it leads somewhere (otherwise it would be a pile of unpaid tickets.) Have they tried following it?
Posted 14 years ago #
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