Bat-mobile parked at 26:00pm half way up a wall

A very lucky group of 500 motorists in Bristol have recently discovered that they no longer have to pay the parking fines which they were issued. This can all be chalked up to errors on the part of the traffic wardens in the area.

The mistakes being recorded range from marking down the wrong location a car is parked in, to getting the times and even the details of the vehicles themselves wrong.

In fact it has been estimated that all the mistakes added together has cost the Bristol City Council over £17,000 in unenforceable fines.

This information was released via the Freedom of Information Act, which also brought to light how the authority normally makes around £2 million every year from parking fines by issuing about 6,000 tickets every month.

A council spokesman said, “If the revenue raised through the issuing of enforcement notices exceeds expenditure on parking services in any one year then the surplus is used in line with the requirements of Section 55 of the Road Traffic Regulation Act 1984.”

For those of you wondering what Section 55 says – as we did before researching it – it says the surplus will then be used for things such as ensuring road safety through traffic lights, concessionary fares and traffic surveys.

Well that sounds good – but we’d quite like not to be given innacutate parking fines in the first place, thank you very much!

Labels: Bristol, motorist, parking fines, road safety, traffic wardens