Peter Viney's Blog

Car Park Tickets. Or these trivial things are sent to try us

No, not parking tickets. The tickets you buy to pay for car parking. They were on my mind yesterday at Chichester Northgate car park. At least the pay machines work by tapping a credit card and issue a traditional ticket.

Wind was the problem yesterday. Sudden gusty wind. You put it on the dashboard, open the door and it blows off. Having a ticket doesn’t save you from parking fines unless it’s displayed. Once in Chichester, I came back to the car to find it on the floor. Fortunately no parking attendant had seen the car.   They used to have peel off stickers on the back so you could stick them on the windscreen. No longer. Possibly it’s because the stickers were expensive (in spite of adverts on the back) and not bio-degradable.

The trouble is, you buy the ticket, put it on view, then you open the back door to get a bag, or open the boot to get out a plastic mac. Or I open one door, a passenger opens another.  That’s when the wind causes problems. The car I had a few years ago used to swallow them down a large vent between the dashboard and windscreen. I lost several down there. I think that was why the ventilation got increasingly poor. A friend had a Volvo which had a little plastic spring clip set on the dashboard. That’s a brilliant idea which no other car manufacturer has copied to my knowledge. On very windy days, I’ve stuck a pencil through the ticket to weight it down.

Then increasingly distrustful councils ask you to put your registration into the ticket machine. This is because people may have to buy a two hour ticket for a twenty minute event, and generously used to offer them to new arrivals, ‘Do you want my ticket? It’s still got over 90 minutes on?’  No money changed hands, and one could argue that a space had been paid for. It was a pleasant and friendly good deed between strangers. So they introduced printing the registration number on the ticket to prevent this happening. Chichester doesn’t do that. It’s a civilised city. It simply says ‘Ticket not transferable’ and trusts us to obey.

Once at an NCP in Bournemouth, we were in Karen’s car, and I put my car registration into the machine instead of hers without thinking. I duly got a £100 fine notice. They hadn’t put a note on the car either (that causes altercations if the driver is around), just took a photo. That one turned out OK. I had not thrown away the ticket, it was still in a pile next to the gear lever, and I sent the ticket and a picture of my car and Karen’s car and explained, and they let me off. Now I keep tickets in the car for a week.

Worse, and one where we did get fined, was Southampton. We wanted to pick up one item from a store in the retail park. A large sign said TWENTY MINUTES FREE PARKING. So I parked, picked up the order, went back to the car in less than ten minutes. There was a parking ticket fine under the windscreen wiper. I could see the attendant. He had been there when we arrived and had watched us park from ten yards away. The bastard pointed out that in small letters on the sign, under TWENTY MINUTES FREE PARKING, it said ‘Free Ticket with time must be obtained and displayed’. I think the fine was £60. I said I would go to court, and they wrote back and said they would accept £20 as “a gesture of goodwill.”  Karen advised me just to pay it. I did. That was Britannia Parking, based in Bournemouth as it happens. That is deliberate fraud.

The new system, in Bath Southgate and Bournemouth BH2 car parks is ticketless. A camera takes the registration number on entry, and you type it in to pay by tapping a credit card at a machine before you exit. Of course that means if you go two minutes over, you are into paying for the next segment. On the whole I like it, but last month I was with a friend from America in his rented car, and we had to walk to the car, and take a phone picture (having neither a pen nor a good memory) of the registration before we could pay. He had never seen the system.

Then there’s the Parking App. At one time, Bournemouth, Poole and Christchurch had three different Apps. The towns are joined and are now one council, as BCP. That’s been resolved and they are the same and work for an extra 10p on the parking charge. You also get a text reminder if you go over the time and you can pay more.  However, that’s the only way you can pay in some car parks and on the street. No coins. No cards. So a Smart Phone is now obligatory.

The three towns where the parking App never works are Reading, Winchester and Marlborough. They all have useless Apps. Recently in Marlborough all the machines had the coin slots taped over and instructions to use the App “MIPERMIT”. There were half a dozen of us there and none of us could get it to work. That’s after entering all the car details and debit card information. Fortunately the woman collecting trolleys in Waitrose car park advised us to forget it. She said it had been like it for two days and no wardens had been seen.

So coins have virtually gone, but where they still exist, there are recent cunning changes. Such as ‘FEE £1.10 – NO CHANGE GIVEN’. I think that’s Christchurch, though it might be £1.20. For years it was a simple £1. People carry far fewer coins nowadays. I end up paying £1.20 or £1.50. Marlborough used to be £2.30 for two hours. I’ve discussed this with other drivers at the machine. Many people end up paying £2.40, £2.50 or even £3. There used to be machines that gave change too. They’ve all gone.

Then Poole has done a crooked one. The council promised not to raise the parking charge from £1.20 an hour. So what did they do? Now the minimum parking time is two hours for £2.40. It used to be one hour. No, they haven’t put up the charge. It’s still £1.20 an hour, but you can’t pay for less than two hours now.