While the restrictions are still being designed by humans, the signs are being manufactured by humans and enforced by humans, you're going to continue to get human error....

While the restrictions are still being designed by humans, the signs are being manufactured by humans and enforced by humans, you're going to continue to get human error....

....Has no one noticed the inordinate number of people who get fined by our council for parking on the high street in the pedestrian zone. These poor people simply don't understand the sign posting because it is so incredibly unclear.
.....

I said but teh public don't understand - they said we don't believe you. So I did and reported a survey - 20 motorists were shown the sign and 17 got its meaning completely wrong

Anyway ladies... the real debate should be why the freak did the council take this all the way to a tribunal!!! They were demonstrably in the wrong!

Yes, the clever bloke took a picture of his car + permit & we all know that a picture never lies......

Mind you, while the restrictions and well understood traffic signs (well you're meant to know some basic signs as part of passing your driving test anyways....) are still a bit too confusing for the hard of thinking, the local traffic management lot will always have their work cut out.

I mean c'mon Ian.... Do you REALLY not know what a No Waiting symbol looks like? It's the red circle with a blue fill and a red line through it. Really? And you found 20 people who also didn't know what it meant? Were they schoolchildren?


Which probably says more about the strictness of the written driving examination than anything else....

The regulations relating to parking restrictions are a mess of red tape and legal mumbo-jumbo, with multiple cross-referenced regulations that would make your head spin. These can all too easily be brought into question when the very very small print is examined under the microscope.

And with more and more staff not having English as their mother tongue, getting to grips with the finer detail of 'Traffic Law English' can prove tricky. Frankly some of the English speaking products of our 'education system' struggle to string a sentence together of written English, so dealing with the finer details of these intricate regulations would be WAY, way beyond their capabilties.....

It is a recognised problem. So much so that DfT are completely revising (dumbing down?) their weighty Traffic Signs Regulations and General Directions bible from a tome of over 1000 pages down to a more manageable and less prescriptive 100 or so pages. This will give less opportunity for challenges to be made over the signs not complying on a technical error. But this won't happen until early 2015.


Until then we're left with situations like the signs on the Parkway bridge. These were perfectly legal and in accordance with said regulations..... except "for the want of a lightbulb"


Yet people still complained they didn't understand the blue sign. Or they didn't know that 'Only' referred to the blue sign. or complained it wasn't big enough. It wasn't visible enough. The road markings with 'BUSES & TAXIS ONLY' wasn't understood.


While the restrictions are still being designed by humans, the signs are being manufactured by humans and enforced by humans, you're going to continue to get human error....

Have you ever seen no waiting signs without yellow lines before? I haven't. I would be guided by what is on the road and would not think to look anywhere else for guidance. If I ever got a ticket there (not that I would) I would challenge it. It verges on entrapment in my view.

dannyboy, I know it's late, but I think you will find the story is that the council took the photo!

"For, instead of correctly fining him £50 for not renewing it, the council tried to impose the maximum £70 charge for failing to display a permit – when its own photographic evidence showed that he had."

Have you ever seen no waiting signs without yellow lines before? I haven't. I would be guided by what is on the road and would not think to look anywhere else for guidance. If I ever got a ticket there (not that I would) I would challenge it. It verges on entrapment in my view.

Have you ever seen no waiting signs without yellow lines before?

I did miss that nugget of info. Which makes it even less of a story. Basically it boils down to a simple human error in the parking fines dept, you know, pressing the wrong key whern processing a valid endorsement.

I did miss that nugget of info.

I did miss that nugget of info. Which makes it even less of a story. Basically it boils down to a simple human error in the parking fines dept, you know, pressing the wrong key whern processing a valid endorsement.

You mean the greenmeanie got it wrong, and the council's precess is not robust enough to filter these errors? Or indeed, don't check appeals before going before 'the beak'?

You don't work in West Berks appeals dept. do you? You seem qualified!


You mean the greenmeanie got it wrong or the council's appeals precess is not robust enough to filter these errors? Or indeed, don't check appeals before going before 'the beak'?

But despite that, why couldn't the spokesman for the council just say sorry, it was an administrative error? Their PR dept. is just as inept in the matters I think. It makes them look arrogant, which just adds fuel for the 'vexatious ones'!

You don't know that.

I doubt they do check appeals.

Mistakes happen. Years back I got stopped for having a headlamp out & got a week to fix defect. I did but didn't bother to tell the police, so I got a summons. The evidence sheet was for a different car, stopped in a different location. The clerk had attached the wrong bits of paper together.

I reworded it, but just as you frequently postulate, I'm doing so too, although this is my hunch in this case.


Of course mistakes happen, but considering the cost of wasting everyone's time going before the panel (for the sake of £20.00), I'd have thought someone would check the claim/appeal, surely?

I reworded it, but just as you frequently postulate, I'm doing so too, although this is my hunch in this case.


Of course mistakes happen, but considering the cost of wasting everyone's time going before the panel (for the sake of £20.00), I'd have thought someone would check the claim/appeal, surely?

It would seem that the cost of filtering out mistakes is greater than the cost of letting them go to tribunal.

Well, I'd prefer if the Council would speak for themselves, but I can see that it might have gone down like this: Greenmeanie issues the ticked because the parking permit has expired, resident complains it's unfair because she didn't know the permit had expired, council takes the view that they can't let them off the ticket because even if it was a genuine mistake it would encourage others to try it on with an old permit. Resident takes the complaint to the Tribunal, and it's only when the adjudicator looks at the penalty that the council's error is discovered - that they tried to fine the resident £70 for not displaying a permit, when in fact they had displayed a permit but it had expired.

Maybe the council's error was pointed out to them and as a matter of policy they simply ignored what the complainant said, but maybe it was a technical administrative error which was never actually complained about. If the latter then it's the fines department's job to get the technicalities right, but mistakes do happen.

But this isn't 'filtering mistakes' this is about responding to a legitimate complaint. This is a story, and hope we get more headlines like this if it happens again.