Parking and Clamping
This was discussed on Radio 5 Live yesterday morning, after reports that the government were to ban clamping on private land. It is probably right to ban the aggressive aspects of this, but what do you do if say you have a private car park on your offices that is always being blocked by illegal parkers. They also interviewed the man who refused to get out of his clamped car, so it could be towed away. Most had sympathy with the man, but I don’t, as he shouldn’t have parked where he did in the first place.
When I could drive, I never parked illegally and I think that in over forty years of driving, I’ve only had a handful of tickets. most of which were because I misread a sign or put the wrong amount of money in a meter.
Now that I use buses a lot, I realise how illegal parkers are a complete menace and slow the traffic a lot more. My post about chaos in Trafalgar Square was partly about illegal parking, but mainly about stupid idiots, who were trying to drive where they shouldn’t.
The irony about the BBC phone-in was that the stand-in presenter, Stephen Nolan admits that he gets lots of parking tickets outside the BBC in Belfast, because he claims there is nowhere to park. Surely, he should use the bus. But then he is almost proud of his very obese state, so I suppose the extra walk would be just too much for him.
I hope the BBC don’t pay his parking tickets.
The Anonymous Widower 
We have an office with a large car park with over 80 parking spaces and it is very annoying when unauthorised people use it. Worse however are the Saturday and Sunday night crowd that descend on Technology Parks, Business Parks and Industrial Parks and race around the roads and car parks at high speed damaging both the hard and soft landscaping and leave a mountain of litter to be cleared up on Monday mornings. The police are not interested until “someone is hurt”. There are web sites that list the locations where there these meets will occur. We have to pay to clear up the mess and repair the damage. We are about to install automatic barriers at the entrance and bollards all around the site to prevent unauthorised access. What a waste on money, time and effort because of a few. It is interesting to note that some of the people involved must be fairly wealthy judging by the cars they drive. We have even recorded a Bentley on our cameras.
Comment by John Wright | August 18, 2010 |
If you have film of it and an expensive car, then I suspect that there are solicitors, who would create a lot of grief for the owner on a no win-no fee basis.
One thing I’ve been looking for is a high-powered speaker that can run on a network. So when you see the idiots there, you just give them a suitable 1,000 watt warning.
I was looking for one here, to ward off the local low-life.
Comment by AnonW | August 18, 2010 |