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Under the Traffic Management Act 2004, parking attendants
(who will be re-named ‘civil enforcement officers’) will no longer
be restricted to attaching penalty charge notices to illegally
parked cars. Starting from Monday 31 March parking tickets can be
mailed to motorists who drive away before the notice is attached to
their windscreen or who physically prevent parking attendants from
attaching the notices.
Councillor Graham Murphy, the city
council’s Cabinet member for environment and community safety, said:
“Parking attendants perform an important role in ensuring that all
motorists have an equal opportunity to make use of on-street parking
bays and council-owned car parks.
“Some motorists think they can
ignore legal parking restrictions with impunity. There have been
cases where people who are clearly contravening the rules have
driven away before parking attendants can attached a ticket to their
windscreen. In other cases drivers or their passengers have
physically prevented attendants from doing their duty.
“In future people who try these
tactics will still get a ticket through the mail after officers
obtain their address details from the Driver and Vehicle Licensing
Agency.”
There will also be two levels of
penalty charge notice for parking violations. Under the two-tier
penalty system, £70 tickets will be issued for contraventions such
as parking on yellow lines, loading bays, resident and disabled
parking areas, taxi ranks, bus stops, cycle routes and in prohibited
areas outside schools.
Lower level £50 penalties will
apply to contraventions such as exceeding the time limit in an
on-street parking bay, parking without a pay-and-display ticket,
‘meter feeding’, misusing an invalid parking ticket and re-parking
in an area without complying with a designated time interval.
Those who receive a charge notice
will still have a 50 per cent discount on penalties if payment is
made within 14 days. The discount concession will last for 21 days
for people who receive a penalty notice through the post.
If the full penalty is not paid
after 56 days a charge certificate increases the full amount by 50
per cent and failure to pay after another 14 days will result in the
matter being referred to the Traffic Enforcement Centre in
Northampton for recovery enforcement – incurring an additional £5
registration fee.
Motorists who wish to contest a
penalty charge notice will still be able to appeal to the National
Parking Adjudication Service (soon to be renamed as the Transport
and Parking Appeals Service).
The city council’s website will
soon provide motorists with full details of Peterborough’s traffic
regulations orders through an online mapping system that will show
all the city’s streets with the parking restrictions in force in
those areas.
The new Traffic Management Act also
gives local authority parking attendants the power to check Blue
Badges issued to drivers with disabilities and to enforce a range of
traffic violations through the use of CCTV cameras. However,
Peterborough City Council has no plans to introduce the CCTV powers
initially.
February 2008 -
Peterborough UK Community Website
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