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Jul
30
Parking Ticket
Filed Under Law |
Wahey! I got an unconditional discharge on my contested parking ticket today. [Unlike the rest of the UK, parking offences still haven't been decriminalised in NI!]
The magistrate didn’t seem to like that the traffic warden had no way of telling whether a meter was accepting credit cards or not, other than “if the credit card light is on, it’s supposedly working”.
It was also quite funny when he interrupted the woman giving evidence from the DVLNI, in the middle of an arduous explanation of how they knew it was my car based on cross-referencing registration documents with Road Tax payments, to point out that he didn’t think that I was actually challenging it being my car.
Nor did he seem impressed that no-one actually had a copy of the actual law in question to discover what should happen if the machine isn’t accepting credit cards. In the end they decided that although I was technically supposed to find some way to pay when the machine was broken, in practice it’s up to the DOE to make sure the machines are working properly, and so I should get an unconditional discharge.