Unfair car parks?

Recently, a statistic came in to Rye News from the rail ticketing agency, Trainline, suggesting that demand for traveling to Rye by train was up by 163% for the Jubilee holiday. One must hope that, knowing this, Southern will have the common sense to run four-car trains. If this is the rail figure, then what of visitors by car? Past experience suggests that there will be few spare spaces in car parks or metered bays and the usual hotspots of Military Road, Tilling Green and elsewhere will become even more jammed than ever.

To offset this, of course, is the undoubted fact that, besides the town’s own Jubilee celebrations, shops, pubs, restaurants and hotels will have a much-needed and well-deserved bumper long weekend. So will the operators of the various car parks around the town. And that brings me to the point of this article.

With every parking space almost guaranteed to be filled throughout the day – and in many cases, throughout the night as well –  the standard charges are going to be substantial, but so also will be the fines levied on those who overstay their allotted time.

The contracts between landowners and the companies than manage parking on their land will vary. However it is not uncommon for the landowner to receive the basic charge and for the operator to make its money out of surcharges and fines. Like any other business, they need to make a profit, and so it is in their interest to collect every penny they can from non-payers and late-leavers.

Every year, Rye News receives letters of complaint from readers who feel that they have been unfairly treated, and in some cases they undoubtedly have. The car park operators in Camber, in particular, came in for a lot of criticism. Euro Car Parks, a very large parking management operator, and who run the facility behind the Kettle O’ Fish roundabout at the end of Wish Street, have raised the ire of one visiting family who have written to Rye News as follows:

“My wife, newborn son and I were lucky enough to have visited your lovely wee town during our first family holiday away over the May bank holiday weekend.

“Unfortunately we had the misfortune of being stung by what can only be described as a ruthless and officious parking operator at the Wish St carpark to the tune of £60. What was confusing for us is the ANPR camera system in operation was not apparent to us and we were under the impression the parking duration was measured via a ‘traditional’ ticketed system. This meant that in the eyes of the operator the time spent in the car park was taken from time of entry and exit, which had our total duration at 2:15hrs (we had paid for 2hrs). However what’s frustrating is that upon further research into the British Parking Association codes of practice there is a grace period allowed for firstly finding your park / getting ticket / read T&C’s which is discretionary (say 5 mins is perhaps fair) and then a minimum of 10 mins allowed at end of parking period to leave the carpark, which places us right on the cusp. What’s really unfair in our eyes is that my wife spent 15 mins when we got back to the car breast feeding our newborn baby who was beside himself at the time. We did contest the fine but the parking operator, Euro Car Parks, coldly ignored our extenuating circumstances and we have had to pay the fine.

“The injustice of it all has left a real foul taste in our mouths so we wanted to reach out to your publication and find out whether you had come across similar circumstances in the past and perhaps even named and shamed the operator? Perhaps you are even aware of the private land owners who choose to let Euro Car Parks enforce these cut- throat policies at great expense to unsuspecting families, are they aware of this? Even if a cautionary message could be shared for others to somehow heed and avoid also being stung then that would be worthwhile in itself.

Look forward to hearing from your team.

Kind regards,
George and Hetal McGregor.”

On reading this my initial sympathies immediately went out to the McGregors – I expect many of us have been in a similar situation with a very small person who is hungry, wants feeding and makes its feelings known by producing as much noise as possible until its wishes are granted (as an aside, I can think of one or two adults who still believe in the same principle!). So one can understand their priorities. If it was not for the ANPR (Automated Number Plate Recognition) camera it would not have mattered. There was, after all, no deliberate attempt to try and cheat on the time limits, it was just force of circumstances and anyway, what about the discretionary time?

The problem with that is first, the discretionary time is intended, I believe, to apply to large multi-storey car parks where at busy times it can certainly take a while to exit (which does not apply to the car park in question), and second, they paid for two hours but overstayed their time, for which we all know that there is going to be a penalty.

Car park operators receive probably thousands of complaints each day for unfair charges and while we have known cases where a penalty has been rescinded, they are few and far between and usually only when the operators themselves can be shown to be at fault.

A little humanity would sometimes be nice in these cases, but sadly, so far as the megalithic car park operators are concerned, humanity and profits are not known bedfellows.

Image Credits: John MInter , John Minter .