Monday, June 11, 2007

When good ideas go bad

The council recently applied for permission to use CCTV images to issues parking tickets to people misusing the loading bay, bus stop and double yellow lines outside Tesco. This is a move that I have been advocating for some time, if only to show the true scale of the problem.

Sadly, it has been implemented in rather an unfortunate way.

Ideally, a notice would have gone up warning people that CCTV was being used for parking control, as the ideal number of parking tickets would have been zero, as people moved on to park or load legally.

Instead, a large number of tickets seem to have been issued, in some cases, several to the same car as a batch of images has been analysed.

Sadly, this makes the whole exercise look like a cynical revenue raising scheme, rather than a positive way of reducing the traffic issues in St Margarets.

The Council needs to erect prominent signs along that stretch of road so that people are aware that CCTV is and has been used to issue parking tickets, to deter people before they get a ticket, not after.

Not everyone is aware of the restrictions, and some people assume that because everyone seems to park there with impunity, the restrictions do not really apply, which is the Council's fault in the first place!

Oh well, you try...

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