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Parking enforcement in “lucrative business” shocker
September 26th, 2007 at 14:44
A few weeks ago I was most annoyed to discover that I had a parking ticket. So annoyed in fact, that I sent in a freedom of information request to try and get some dirt on parking enforcement – I was hoping that it’d turn out that employing traffic wardens makes a massive loss, and so I’d be able to smugly wave my finger at them disapprovingly for wasting money.
Unfortunately, it turns out that employing traffic Nazis makes you loads of money.
If you like wildly extrapolated data based on unverifiable assumptions, you’ll love this.
On January 2nd this year, the council took control of parking enforcement (instead of the police) – they’ve sub-contracted this to a third party company who employ 33 parking attendants. (Autistic level of detail: They want it to rise to 37 pending approval by the council). From the year to date (September? Early September?), how much have the council made from parking enforcement? £1,251,000.
If we assume that to be until the start of September, call it nine months, that means that on average, each attendant has bought in £37,909 in that time- and this is presumably (key word there) after the expense of actually running the thing, as that’ll be handled by the third party company. This is a lot of money.
Lets look at it another way – the standard fine if you pay within 14 days is £30. If we assume that most people paid that, then approximately 41,700 parking fines were issued to make the one and a quarter million pound profit for the council. In the 242 days between the council taking control of parking and September, That works out at just over 172 parking violations a day. Which, er, is probably about reasonable for a big city.
So what’s the lesson in all this? Remember to check if you need to pay and display before leaving your car? You can’t be like Mark Thomas exposing governmental lies and hypocrisy if they’re actually running a reasonable operation? No, of course not. The lesson here is that if you want to make money, start your own council and start fining people for parking.
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