If you are looking for the answer to the question why does a parking ticket fine cost so much? The answer should be started with the mention of the Road Traffic Act of 1991 where the parking regulations and parking ticket issuance as an activity was handed over to the local councils.
Hence, traffic wardens do not work under police now, but the council.
On the 31st day of March, 2008, the Traffic Management Act 2004 was brought to effect wherein parking fines were categorized into higher and lower offence zones. For example, your fine amount is higher if you park on a double yellow line than if you have an expired pay and display ticket on you.
The parking ticket can cost the motorist a lot of money. This high cost may be because it acts as a deterrent to motorists not to contravene parking regulations.
Since the council has to pay administrative expenses like wages to traffic wardens, their training cost, handling motorist appeals and following up outstanding parking fines, all these are included in the parking fine that you have to pay.
A lot of local councils outsource this work to external private companies. Almost all the times the former is seen to prefer remaining at the back.
A discount of about 50% is given to motorists who pay up early. Now, this results in a lot of motorists not going in fo appealing in the fear that the discount would be lost if they had to appeal a second time.
Any local council's yearly budget has revenue from parking tickets as an important element. In fact the appeal process we are entitled to is also funded by the parking fines! Doesn't that make you think that the system is biased? It relies on fines for finance and is not independent itself.
Maintaining and increasing this source of revenue thus is extremely important for a council and their contractors, a group who might also be on certain percentage.
Hence, parking tickets issued in this country are more often than not unjust and unfair. IN fact 70% of them do not even have a legal basis. However, you will never see or hear about the council to do anything regarding this.
In case of traffic wardens now, the approach is ticket first, everything later. However, about 7-% of motorists win their appeals.
Various councils in the past have rejected appeals made by motorists immediately without having any legally valid reason. It is only because they want to protect their income.
It is extremely difficult for the public in general to prove such malpractices exists and are practiced by the local councils.
So essentially huge parking fines are there to restrain motorists from creating a chaos on the street while for the council, it acts as an attractive offer to earn some extra revenue. Something like an indirect tax.
Do you happen to know anybody who was issued a ticket for no reason and he wanted to appeal but didn't know what to do and how to do it? There exists numerous websites who tell you the process in its entirety and also help you draft the letter that can cancel any parking ticket.
The truth remains that the pressure is more on the traffic wardens to issue maximum number of parking tickets and in fact this is what leads to so many legally invalid tickets to be issued, an information which might come to your use while you appeal.
Moreover, many do not take the hassle of appealing since they have a pre-conceived notion that appeal letters are difficult and complicated to jot down. But there exists innumerable websites where such templates as well as samples are provided to make life easier.
Two strategies exist towards successful parking ticket appealing. The first one being providing photographic evidence in the form of pictures taken of the area having no signboards or markings on the road to prohibit parking.
The second technique involves going by what the parking ticket says in reality. Thus, if is says that you were parked in Smith Road, it could have been the case that you were parked on Smith street.
Last but not the least there exists parking tickets that are issued privately which one must never bother about. These would look similar to the publicly issued ones and would follow up with several threat letters, but would eventually stop disturbing you if you do not pay any heed to them. Always remember that they'll never drag you to court since the fine amount they'll extract from you is much lower than the court fees they have to pay.
Author Resource:-
Please visit http://www.cancelmyticket.co.uk for more information regarding Parking Appeals. Find out how to get any UK ticket cancelled. Get more information about how to Appeal Parking Ticket from this site.
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