Nadhim Zahawi was headed home on his scooter earlier in the year when a car lurched his way, hurling him into the middle of a busy road.
As he lay in an ambulance at the scene, his left leg broken like a breadstick, an incredulous bystander ran up to his stretcher to inform him that a parking enforcement officer had just ticketed his mangled scooter. In that instant, Zahawi became a poster boy of sorts for a parking enforcement system "gone mad," as he puts it.
PHOTO: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
"They are totally ruthless," said Zahawi, the managing director of YouGov, a polling company. "The system needs reining back."
Zahawi appealed against his US$180 ticket, and won, but not before being told that the parking official erred only because she did not realize it was the scene of an accident.
"I mean, there was debris everywhere," Zahawi said. "I was in the back of an ambulance. I don't know how she could have missed a great big ambulance and a police van."
In a place as densely packed as England, clashes between motorists and "parking attendants" have risen to absurd heights.
Stories from aggrieved motorists, who say they feel tricked, dogged and hunted, while their pleas for mercy go ignored, are legion. Mothers with babes in arms, disabled people in wheelchairs, people weak with cancer have all complained publicly about the heartlessness of the system.
Derek Scott, for example, stopped to ask a parking attendant in London for directions, only to be ticketed by a second attendant as he listened to the instructions. Brian and Sheila Sharp received a London parking ticket by mail -- but they had not been in London in 20 years.
The most common complaints revolve around ghost tickets -- tickets people never receive, yet are penalized for not paying.
"It is getting close to meltdown out there because of the number of scams," said Barrie Segal, founder of AppealNow.com, a popular Web site that helps motorists appeal tickets.
On the flip side, parking attendants, routinely spat upon and lashed with expletives, now face an increase in serious violence. In Oxfordshire last month, one was pummeled by a gang of youths in broad daylight, and in Lincolnshire one was mowed down by a car. In London this year, attendants have been variously threatened with a broken bottle, sprayed with cement, kicked in the groin and smashed in the face with a bat.
It is no wonder that parking attendants, many of them recent immigrants -- a fact that has led some columnists to say racism plays a role in the abuse -- are calling to be outfitted with stab-proof vests in at least one neighborhood. That is, if they have not already quit their US$11-an-hour job. Turnover, say the spokesmen for the private companies who employ them, is quite high.
The face-off between motorist and parking attendant began with a 1991 law that shifted parking enforcement from the police to local councils. The local councils, in turn, have mostly farmed the work out to private companies, who sign contracts that often specify how many tickets parking attendants are expected to issue. Local councils -- London has 34 -- can keep the revenue so long as they invest it in transportation.
Westminster, in central London, faces a daily onslaught of 135,000 cars trying to park in 43,000 parking spaces. This imbalance brought the Westminster City Council, which has been accused of running a revenue mill, nearly US$50 million in its last fiscal year. In all, councils in London collected an estimated US$296 million from some 9.6 million tickets, according to a survey by AppealNow.Com.
"It's pretty big business, it's fair to say," said a council spokesman.
Critics say the shift from police to local councils changed the emphasis from ensuring smooth traffic to enriching councils.
"The old-style traffic warden would march up and down roads all day, telling people to hop to it," said Kevin Delaney, head of traffic and road safety for the Royal Automobile Club. "You only got a ticket if you ignored him. The parking attendant will watch you park illegally, wait until you've left and give you a ticket." he said.
"That's how we got to where we are now," he added.
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