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Melbourne’s parking inspectors have long been renowned as right bastards. The “grey ghosts” are legendary for springing out of nowhere just as terrified car owners are sprinting to put another coin in the meter. They have been handing out tickets to hospital staff in their own car parks and, urban legend has it, once put tickets on a car for days before reporting to police that there was a deceased driver inside.
Not even the Wuhan Plague has stopped them. Even during Stage Four lockdowns, councils confirmed that parking inspectors would still be patrolling the streets.
But, harassed Melbourne car owners have finally been given a little victory over the grey ghosts stalking their streets.
The local council overseeing the core of the Australian city of Melbourne has been told to refund around 1,200 fines that resulted from drivers making a minor typo.
At issue was the common error of mistaking an O for 0.
The ombudsman[…]probed the matter after someone blew the whistle on unfair parking fines caused by drivers who accidentally entered either a capital “O” or the numeral zero into the PayStay cash-free parking app when their licence plates contained the other character. PayStay allows parking inspectors to check that payments have been made for a parked car.
Entering the wrong characters was not allowed as a valid reason to appeal a parking fine.
The judge disagreed and struck a blow for the common folk.
The ombudsman found two problems with the fines, the first of which is that the typography used on car number plates issued in Victoria makes it all-but-impossible to distinguish a capital O and a zero. Drivers therefore innocently mistyped their number plates.
The other was that the regulations governing council officers did not allow them discretion to waive the fines.
The ombudsman’s report into the matter found that council management knew that the mistakes were innocent, knew that their employees’ hands were tied, and didn’t care enough to either let them bend or change the rules.
Thankfully, the investigation did not find that those attitudes were motivated by a desire to increase revenue through parking fines.
Oh, sure. We believe that just as much as we believe Dan Andrews when he says he knew nuzzink about hotel quarantine.
The council isn’t giving in so easily, naturally.
PayStay weighed in conducting a data-cleansing exercise that saw it mail “approximately 9,000 drivers who had incorrectly entered their registration details to request that they log into their account to check their registration and correct the error.”
Once those warnings had been sent, the council resumed fines for the character confusion.
Now the council has not changed its rules to allow parking inspectors discretion to not issue fines based on zero/O confusion, but has made it a valid reason for an appeal against a fine.
Well, isn’t that generous of them?
The ombudsman is not completely satisfied with that outcome.
One suspects that neither are Melbourne’s car owners.
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