Bedford Driving Lessons

Persecuted motorists are being handed five times as many parking tickets as they were a decade ago, figures show. New mobile CCTV cameras are being used to catch drivers who may only have stopped momentarily. One case was based on just 17 seconds of film. There have even been instances of automated fines being generated for moving vehicles. More than four million tickets with penalties of up to £105 a time were dished out by wardens and councils across the country last year. Numbers have leapt more than ten per cent in the past two years, fuelled by the introduction of controversial CCTV-equipped camera cars. More…How to fight a parking ticket – and win Instead of tickets being slapped on the windscreen, drivers discover a fine only when the automatically generated ticket drops through their letterbox. But misuse of the cameras has led to a stinging rebuke from the official appeals watchdog, the Traffic Penalty Tribunal. In one case that was thrown out on appeal, a council issued a ticket using CCTV footage of ‘some 17 seconds’. In another rejected case, a fine was issued when a car stopped for 46 seconds to allow driver and passenger to swap places. The report also highlights cases of camera cars parking on double yellow lines to catch errant drivers and councils that fail to put up signs warning drivers that CCTV is in operation.  More