It appears that the days of a Council ranger getting out of their car to walk our CBD streets are a thing of the past. Now, instead of chatting to locals, looking for defects they might report back to the office such as over flowing garbage bins or graffiti, and for the bulk of the time being the face of the Council, our rangers, as reported in DRIVE, are in their cars doing drive-by's looking for parking infringements. No longer do they need to chalk the tyres once, take a note of the time, and then return a minute after the time allowed expires to issue a parking infringement. Now they can simply cruise carparks and use their new automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) technology. The added bonus is that don't even have to get out of their car to put the ticket under your windscreen. Now it arrives by mail a week or so later. And for the driver? They have no idea they have been booked. This poses a dilemma for the driver as they have no opportunity to take photographic evidence that they might use to challenge the ticket. Take for example receiving a fine that says you parked with your tyres on a parking bay line: 211 Parking in parking bays The driver must position the driver’s vehicle completely within a single parking bay, unless the vehicle is too wide or long to fit completely within the bay. The immediate challenge would be; are the parking bay widths to standard? For one reason or another our parking bays have become smaller. The standard size of a car park in Australia is approximately 2.4 m wide by 5.4 m long Crikey reports:
Sales of the Ford Ranger are up 42% in January. The 1.87-metre tall 4×4 ute has been Australia’s top-selling car for a while now, and the number of them on the road keeps rising.
But the Ford Ranger is teensy-weensy next to the Chevrolet Silverado. That’s the big ute offering from General Motors ever since it closed down the Holden brand. The Silverado is 1.91 metres tall, more than two metres wide and nearly six metres long. Sales rose 215% in January.
A RAM ute is 2.46m wide and even the humble HiLux ute is now 1.850m wide.
Will Council be changing the dimensions of their Public carspaces to suit the new fleets?
The article in DRIVE by Joshua Dowling published on 16 February 2023 offers that "Councils who have made the switch to "invisible" parking tickets – which means motorists have no idea they've been pinged until they get the fine in the mail weeks later – say the new process reduces the risk of enforcement officers being abused, and tickets being lost or damaged due to poor weather".
The interesting take-home on that is the reference to "enforcement officers". If the task is to surreptitiously drive around our Public Carparks and monitor vehicles overstaying their time periods using automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) technology couldn't anyone with training do this task?
This would free up our fully trained rangers to attend to more important issues.
Eurobodalla Council was identified as one of 36 of the 128 NSW council areas across the state to have switched to "invisible" parking tickets.
While the council of old would have said "There is no need to tell the community anything about this as it is an 'OPERATIONAL matter'", maybe the new council might reconsider that once audacious and arrogant approach and explain to Eurobodalla residents what they have done, and why.
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