PCN at 20:45 in 9AM-9PM street parking bay

[Ethel Street]

Arguing that the 9am-9pm 7 days a week restriction is unreasonable or uneccessary will be a complete waste of your time so I wouldn't bother. It's entirely at council's discretion and assuming they didn't make any procedural errors in setting up the restriction and signposting it there is virtually zero possibility of getting your PCN overturned on those grounds.

 

I once went to the parking adjudicator after my council one night decided to ticket residents' cars parked overnight in empty and otherwise unused motorcycle bays in a  quiet suburban side street at 2.30am in the morning! Adjudicator told me that the unreasonableness of both the restriction and the 2.30am ticketing were irrelevant to whether the PCN was valid and he couldn't take it into account. (Although I won on different grounds, restriction not properly signposted in accordance with regulations.)

[Ethel Street]

On 30/01/2023 at 11:09, vweb said:

Basically the whole street (around 200 meters in length) and a few parallel and adjacent streets (maybe around 300m in total length) has the sign around paying by phone OR by meter, and there's NOT a single meter there.

 

I'll bet they've done what my local council did. Remove all the machines where you could buy a ticket in the street because the council decided they could save money by forcing everyone to pay for parking via their phone. My council did at least manage to alter the signs to cover up the reference to 'Pay at Machine' on the same day as they removed the machines. Sounds like yours didn't.

 

So I agree you have a good case for misleading signage. After all you weren't familiar with the area were you? So how would you be expected to know, arriving there for the first time on a dark cold winter's night, that the machines had been removed? So obviously you went looking for them. And to pay by phone is usually a lengthy and convoluted process. First you have to register your car with whichever Pay by Phone company the council is using because I don't suppose you'd used that service before had you? That can be quite time consuming. Especially if the mobile signal wasn't great at the time. 

 

So all in all you could easily spend more than 15 minutes attempting to pay, by which time they'd given you a PCN.

 

The council probably will reject your reresentations but I reckon you'd have a good chance if you take it to adjudication.

 

There's no specific wording that I'm aware of. Just explain what happened in your own words. Do a draft and post it up for people here to comment on. But first check out the procedures that your council follow and make sure you meet their deadlines.

 

Last time I went to a parking adjudicator they had a search box on their site that let me look for similar cases. You may have to be a bit creative about what words to searh for to find what you want.

 

Make sure you've kept photos showing that signs still say Pay at Machine