Pages

Monday 27 January 2014

Motorists charged £1.7m in parking fines on just one street

Brooke Vincent Sighting - Manchester

Nearly �1.7million has been raised from parking fines on a single road in East London, according to new official figures.

Motorists parking on Cranbrook Road in Ilford paid a collective �1,661,711 in parking fines in 2013, making it the highest earning street for the council in the country.

It was closely followed by the Clapham Park Road bus lane, which netted �998,797 in fines for Lambeth council.

Outside the Capital, the worst road for fines was Gloucester Road in Bristol, which netted �267,351.

Redbridge council, which administers parking enforcement on the Cranbrook Road, has been criticised for using motorists to bump up its income in the face of cuts to local government funding.

Local residents accuse traffic wardens of aggressively enforcing restrictions, including ticketing cars in pay and display bays the minute their paid parking allocation time expires.

Raj Kumar, who runs a travel agent on the 2.2-mile road, has warned that local businesses are being adversely affected by over-zealous traffic wardens, claiming his family had paid thousands in fines and that 70 per cent of his business had now disappeared.

Speaking to The Sun, the 65-year-old said: "They will completely finish us off. Businesses are closing up and down the road, people used to come and park and do their shopping.

"Now they go to big shops with their own car parks."

The astonishing figures come despite central government warnings in 2010 to local authorities using motorists as cash cows. A total of �1.4billion was raised for councils last year as a combination of both parking charges and fines.

An AA spokesman, speaking to The Sun, suggested that streets with such high revenue from parking fines should have better signs and that drivers should be better deterred from parking there in the first place

No comments:

Post a Comment