A Brighton Boy Blogs

Brighton Parking Restriction Notice

Today is Sunday. The parking restrictions on my road are clearly displayed as Mon-Fri noon-1pm. There are very faded, patchy single & double yellow lines which haven’t been repainted for years, and a few months ago there were Council notices tied to lamp posts about lifting parking restrictions to allow more parking locally. So what was a traffic warden doing walking up & down issuing parking tickets? The Council is probably hoping that people are idiots who get scared into paying up even when they don’t have to. Hopefully they’re wrong.

A parking ticket (PCN) illegally issued by Brighton & Hove City Council

So, Brighton & Hove City Council – please tell us – what will it take to stop you and your imbeciles from wasting everyone’s time and money with these continued attempts to extort money from people fraudulently?

After I reported my parking ticket woes in my post entitled Brighton & Hove Parking – A Criminal Racket in Disguise, I appealed the PCN and got a rejection notice from the Council. No surprise there – after all they have to earn their money from somewhere, even if it’s from fraud.

Well, my fellow business breakfast club members were up in arms at the claims by Brighton & Hove City Council that I had parked my vehicle in a loading bay early one morning without any loading being observed. “But that was the morning of your presentation” one said, “I saw you unloading all your kit”. Others agreed and were outraged at Brighton & Hove City Council’s blatant attempt at criminal fraud.

So, one by one they submitted signed witness statements for me to forward to the Parking Tribunal. Unfortunately the rejection notice had arrived whilst I was away, which didn’t help, particularly as they give you a measly 28 days to bring the case to the notice of the Parking Tribunal. Not a lot when you have to gather evidence from disparate sources. But why should I be surprised when the vested interests of the multi-million pound parking racket are at stake, that everything should be stacked in their favour and run to their schedule?

So, now I await the outcome of the Tribunal and I’ll let you know when it arrives.

Some time later: Well, I have to report that Brighton and Hove City Council didn’t even bother trying to defend my appeal, and so the Parking Tribunal found in my favour by default. This indicates that the council knew all along that it didn’t have a leg to stand on & was just hanging on in the vain hope that I would shut up, give up and pay up.

In a week when my car was unceremoniously seriously injured by a motorist (thanks, Mr Farmer) who blamed me (the oncoming traffic) after he thought it’d be ok to execute a right turn across the carriageway from a stationary, parked position without indication or regard for oncoming traffic, I thought things couldn’t get much worse. So there I was, unloading my hire car in the loading bay in front of the Courtlands Hotel in Hove, for a breakfast business meeting, thinking “it’d be just my luck to be ticketed in a loading bay, but at least I’m loading”… only to return to the car at 8:25am in the middle of loading again to see a traffic warden – sorry, Civil Enforcement Officer – issuing a parking ticket – sorry, Penalty Charge Notice (PCN). I’ve had experience of these before, of course, and rarely as a result of illegal parking – see “ One Hour’s Parking for the Price of Two” for the last piece of Brighton & Hove City Council idiocy.

This particular traffic warden (number 685 – from his “signature” he’s called Mr Squiggle) seemed to be taking far too much pleasure from the mere routine issue of a piece of bureaucratic paperwork, as do many of them. It’s important to realise that Brighton & Hove City Council’s Civil Enforcement Officers – please let’s just call them traffic wardens for sanity’s sake – are not given direct incentives or enticements to issue tickets, which might encourage them to issue more and more marginal tickets in order to achieve their personal or set targets. No, that would just be good old plain wrong. However according to Brighton & Hove City Council staff, absolutely nothing is done to prevent staff from maintaining private bets and sweepstakes which might engender an undue sense of competition between traffic wardens, and according to at least one member of staff these are rife. Such activities in other sectors would be regarded as acts of gross professional misconduct, but the parking business is rather different. In addition, there is strong first-hand evidence to suggest that the Council sets targets for parking revenues, and that traffic wardens who are underperforming face disciplinary action and loss of employment. OK, so scratch my “no direct incentives or enticements” statement… I think you can safely say that there are incredibly strong incentives for staff to issue as many parking tickets as possible.

Of course the system is built with no flexibility – or indeed politeness. Once you’ve been issued with a ticket, the only ways out are through the system and out the other side – either by written appeal, paying the penalty, or fighting bailiffs (which the Council parking staff love to threaten you with) & going to court. So once that ticket is printed out from the proudly wielded little electronic device the traffic wardens all carry, it has already cost you time and money. Since this ticket was issued wrongly, I should be charging for my time spent on the matter by invoicing the Council and chasing for the debt – but there’s no “sorry we cocked up” latitude built into the system either. Parking has been set in legislation as a legalised racket which Councils and private firms can exploit to their hearts’ content.

And all the little hitlers can go on having fun and making money at our expense – twice – because while we pay with our Council Tax for their perversely pleasurable little betting games, we also pay for the entire machine to grind away raking in our parking fines too. What an utter waste of time, money and resources. Please, Mr Osborne, how about we cut the parking bureaucracy first?

See also Testing the Parking Tribunal and Parking Tribunal Victory over Brighton & Hove City Council

This unadvertised special offer from Brighton & Hove City Council occurred on… yes you guessed it, April 1st. So how many others received PCNs (Penalty Charge Notices) erroneously? How much has it all cost to sort out?

Just to explain, for some reason some Brighton parking ticket machines were issuing one-hour tickets when they should have been issuing two-hour tickets. Yes it’s all so easy to sort out, but why should I have to spend my valuable time sorting out yet another Brighton & Hove City Council bureaucratic cock-up? It might help if they employed Parking Wardens with brains… sorry, “Civil Enforcement Officers”.

Oh dear, now I’ll probably be chastised & hated for insulting council workers… but let’s face it, it doesn’t take much brain power to work out that a parking machine saying “£3 for up to 2 hours” and a parking ticket saying £3 paid for 13:12 to 14:12 means that no PCN should have been issued in the first place!

Sometimes, just occasionally, inspiration comes along and in a flash you have the answer to a whole raft of problems, all at once. It was a bit like that for me one morning as I fought my way up the A23/A27 slip road trying desperately to move from the right hand lane across three lanes of traffic to the left hand filter lane for the A27 Westbound whilst the other drivers coming up the inside aggressively accelerated to prevent me from doing so.

We all know that our roads are too crowded. We all know that there are many, many bad drivers on the road. Most of us know that we’re killing the planet by driving too many cars, and that we should stop. Many of us aspire to improving our health and that of the planet by cycling everywhere, but it’s made harder by belligerent car drivers and dangerous cyclists, as well as the Great British Weather. We also know in our heart of hearts that it would be better for the environment, and probably for our souls, if we all took public transport but we’re also aware that it’s a less than perfect transport solution for a number of reasons. First, there’s the underinvestment, partly caused by a lack of bums on seats; second the fact that it has to share space with all the other more dominant forms of transport including all those idiot bad drivers in their cars… who, incidentally also make our roads more dangerous, cause more accidents, cost the NHS, emergency services and British businesses lots of money, and generally cause misery and stress.

So where’s the inspiration in all this? It’s quite simple actually. Just get the UK Government’s so-called Driving Standards Agency to do its job: raise driving standards. In short, make the driving test a lot more difficult, and the required standard of driving far higher. Then less people will pass, and there’ll be less drivers on the roads. Anyone who has had a road traffic accident in which fault was either theirs or inconclusive should be forced to retake the driving test, as should the elderly, annually. Anyone who took their driving test before, for example, 1985, should also retake their test, and the general population should take a fresh test every 10 years.

The result: less cars on the road, more use of public transport, more income to public transport, more investment in public transport; safer roads, less cost to NHS, less disruption to surgical schedules by emergencies; and the nation would be far more likely to hit its carbon emission targets with fewer cars sitting in traffic jams caused by selfish twats who drive like morons on our overcrowded roads.

So, over to you… what do you think?

Years ago – in 1981 – when I was a mere fourteen years of age, I started doing the London to Brighton Bike Ride. Living in Brighton, we’d get up very early, catch one of the special trains to Clapham Junction, and proudly start the ride. Depending on the mood of our little group of friends, we’d either complete the thing in a few hours, or take our time, make loads of stops for Women’s Institute doughnuts and so on, and get into Brighton sometime in the afternoon. We’d be able to ride home to freshen up, then go out for a quick meal in the evening. It’s an annual event that holds a fond place in my memory over many consecutive years.

At some point in the late 80’s I stopped doing the ride. I had seen it get more over-crowded and dangerous, with so many people doing the ride unofficially that fast downhill sections like Slugwash Lane had become scenes of many inevitable accidents – one year I remember seeing the road awash with blood – and narrow uphill sections were turning the event into the London to Brighton Bike Shuffle.

I did the ride with my wife & friends a couple of years during the late 90s & early 2000s, but things weren’t much better. So it was goodbye L2B from me.

Yesterday I experienced once again the utter farce of what the London to Brighton Bike Ride does to Brighton. Road closures would be OK. Diversions fine. But when tens of thousands of extra cars (many of them 4×4 domestic trucks) are coming into Brighton for the sole reason that they’re picking up one or more cyclists, something is badly wrong. Traffic down a 15-mile stretch of the A23 came to a virtual standstill. Doesn’t the British Heart Foundation care about it? Surely the pollution alone should tell them that something has to change – it certainly can’t be good for the heart, and I wonder what the British Lung Foundation would say on the matter. And making it the day of countless other summer events, village fetes, and indeed Father’s Day – that’s just asking for trouble.

I daresay nothing will change next year. It’s a stupid, overhyped event which has become unmanageable. Sure it had noble roots and a great cause behind it, but nowadays it’s just a menace. At the very least it needs a new route, a major rethink, better public transport coordination, and a ban on pickups by car. The London to Brighton Bike Ride has gone bad.

Having witnessed the Police presence in Brighton today for the “Smash EDO” protest, which led me to have to drive a 10-mile diversion to deliver my girlfriend to work, I read with interest the statement issued by the Brighton & Hove City Commander, Chief Supt Graham Bartlett, as follows: Read more…

Incredible. This morning (about half an hour ago actually) I witnessed an Adur Council refuse collection vehicle being driven into my childrens’ school at we arrived. The driver was self-righteously waving away parents dropping their kids off at school as he drove the wrong way up a narrow road which everyone voluntarily treats as a one-way street, and tried to maneuvre the lorry into the narrow driveway. I stayed clear, allowing him to pass.

A few minutes later, Read more…

Some people reading my writings about food might think I’m a bit of a food snob. I can see how that might be misconstrued, so here’s something that might redress the balance. Read more…

15th September 2008: It was a Monday evening in Brighton, it was getting late for dinner, and we fancied sushi. Moshi Moshi would have been our usual destination, but being closed on Mondays we remembered YO! Sushi in Jubilee Street and decided to give it a try. Perhaps a little glimpse at the competition might prove eye-opening.

Read more…