Are parking attendants lobotomised at birth?!
 

I cannot believe it. Just been out with my mum (who is disabled). We finally find a disabled parking space in a council run car park that does not charge for disabled drivers.

So we park up, display the badge and display the wheel thing with an accurately set time allowing us 3 hours. One hour into our stay a jobsworth plants a £60 fine on the windscreen claiming that they could not read the disabled badges. They were right in the centre of the dash, the correct way up, and totally unobscured.

Of course the parking office that was open could only take payments, not complaints. So now we have to go through some lengthy appeals process just because some retard fancied increasing their tally for the day.

We've taken a couple of pictures of the car and badges, but its still going to be our word against theirs. They will no doubt claim that we went into the car and turned the things around or something.

Bunch of effing useless morons. Totally amazes me how they can read the small print of a tax disc, but not the really huge bold print of a disabled badge.

Are you serious? :wonder:

Damn!

YES! Totally serious, Darlington Borough Council can hang their heads in shame!

Feel for you - Local councils are all the same staffed by complete jobsworth idiots who simply can not get a job elsewhere and get hung on the power they think they have.

See my post the probs I'm having with my ex local authority at the moment !
https://www.scoobynet.com/non-scooby...-question.html

Richard

I had that happen to me in a private car park and they even put the totally wrong colour of my vehicle on the ticket.... I assumed this would help my case if he was that blind but I still had to pay it :(

You actually had to pay that!! You even went to court to defend? I'm not talking about some sort of parking appeal that the company who issued the ticket run...

We'll defend this one in court if we have to. I hold no hope that the appeals process will be of any use to us at all. They council are hardly going to say that they got it wrong.

Utterly appalling, Lumy. Our Council is having to pay back thousands to motorists because of fining for the sake of it. Good luck :thumb:

I bet he was a very small, rotund person, with a face like a smacked bum. They all look like that who work for our Council :D

I didn't go to court as the company told me they didn't have to honour the disabilty badge so I just paid the £20 before it doubled

Luminous, I think a quick call to the local paper might be in order. I am sure they would love to run a story about the local council persecuting disabled drivers. Methinks the council may just wave it if they are given the opportunity to put their side of the story prior to publication ;) :D

I've had a fiddle just got the photo off our phone. If you can make out the time displayed from a mobile phone image taken in the rain, you can certainly make out the time if you are a warden looking through the screen:

[img=http://img177.imageshack.us/img177/3779/photo0003ze0.th.jpg]

11.30pm ;)

I think i might know why, is the photo not supposed to be face down?

Its a 24 hr clock :razz:

(You had me going for a second :lol1:)

Yep,

Disabled Forum comments

Still a jobsworth, if you appeal im sure they will cancel it, dont show the photos though...

Dunno, but the ticket clearly states that he could not read the time on the badge.

pointless rule as the person would generally be away from the car for the parking spacks to check its valid for the driver..

If the person is with car they can ask them to flip or show the permit surely ?

BUT...












RULES

are

RULES!!!

thats what i had quoted to me by parking warden as i tried to run him over after he put a ticket on my van 1 minute after it expired!

I can see it's a 24hr clock and hence the 23 and 24 in little symbols means the time you indicted was 11.30 PM

Probably why the jobsworth cnut gave you a ticked. Did you not mean 11.30 am and therefore the number above would be 11 and 12 respectively ??

Ahh, I see what you mean. Will double check that. As far as I know the inner ring has only the numbers 1-12, with 13-24 being on the outer ring. The time shown is therefore always open to debate, perhaps we arrived at 11:30pm, maybe it was 11:30am. Given you are only allowed three hours parking, the attendants are meant to check sufficiently often for that not to be an issue. I don't believe there is any other way to mark 11:30am, but I will look.

At any road, the attendant did not complain of an overstay, the offence noted that was that the time was unreadable.

Maybe we should just do what other disabled drivers do, park on double yellow lines wherever the hell you like. The coppers around here have a no disabled driver gets a parking ticket policy. Would be easier for us, but we try to follow the rules and get this as a reward.

There's the issue of displaying the photo side which doesn't tell the parking attendant whether or not the badge is valid as there is no date on that side.

The clock can only show 11(23).

Thanks, will double check the picture to make sure its really showing face up ;)

If you have taken a picture on your phone that won't be much use !! As if its the same as an accident??? digital photo's don't count as they can be altered... it has to be on a proper camera. Thats why i carry one in each vehicle I drive

TBH, it's time for a bit of civil disobedience.

Pay the fine, the find some way of costing them a whole lot MORE than it cost you;)

Alcazar

And thats your eveidence to get you out of the fine ???? if I were you I would just pay the £20 now. It may piss you off but it will be a lot cheaper in the long run

Nah, its not £20, its £60. As for paying up, its a point of principal. We did not commit the offense that was stated on the ticket. Why should we pay up?

Most probably the very reason that the fine was issued in the first place was because most people just don't bother fighting it. Which in turn means they are more likely to do that in the future. We have to stand and fight, otherwise each and every time we park there in the future we will be back in the same boat.

Their policy clearly states that disabled parking is free. My mum was disabled and attending a medical appointment nearby. We are not going to pay

It is a common misconception that photographs taken or stored digitally are not admissable as evidence. This is not so. Digital photographs are admissible as evidence in UK courts, provided that the digital images are appropriately authenticated. This is the same rule as applies to other evidence in UK courts. Its also a case that technical authentication isn't required, but technical authentication increases the evidential weight of the photographs. It's usually done by a signed witness statement by the photographer to authenticate the image - this is something that as a pro photographer I have first hand experience of.

So don't worry about using a digital camera to take pics of an accident etc, just don't be tempted to manipulate them, no matter how good you think you are with Photoshop.

Coming back to the original post, hope you get it sorted.

Gareth

I never knew that as I keep buying disposable camera's :)

Is it?

How many accidents have you had ??? :D

Seriously, a digital camera is fine.

Gareth

People seem to like crashing into my van :D