Scan cars have taken over the work of parking attendants in most large municipalities over the past ten years. The checks take place completely digitally with cameras that automatically scan license plates of parked cars. In this way, many more license plates can be checked per hour, resulting in higher revenues and less parking nuisance.
But research by RTL Nieuws shows that a small group of parkers are seriously affected by the digitalization of parking enforcement. A tour of large municipalities shows that hundreds of people every year who make a mistake when renewing, paying or adjusting their parking permit are bombarded with fines.
Financial stress
“Most people end up getting some of the fines waived if they explain their mistake, but then it’s already months further, with all the financial stress that entails,” says Munish Ramlal, ombudsman for Amsterdam. “That is the world upside down, municipalities must try to prevent their citizens from ending up in this situation.”
It usually starts with a small mistake by the citizen himself. For example, a couple over 80 from Rotterdam bought a new car this spring, but forgot to pass on the corresponding new license plate to the municipal parking department in order to adjust the permit.
The first fines soon followed. The seniors, who are not good with computers, sent a letter to the municipality, but it ended up with the wrong official. Meanwhile, the fines kept pouring in. Only when the Rotterdam ombudsman got involved did the fines stop. The counter then stood at 42 additional assessments worth an amount around 3,000 euros.
Expansion parking area
An Amsterdam resident received 59 fines in a short time because he accidentally entered the license plate of his loan car instead of that of the lease car. And in the municipality of Almere, things went wrong for a whole group of residents when the area for paid parking was expanded in 2022. Dozens of residents in these neighborhoods did not know this, and were issued 10 to 61 fines in a few weeks.
It also started with a mistake for the Amsterdam transport entrepreneur Koike Hess. The payment slip for his parking permit was sent to a non-existent address, leaving the six-monthly bill unpaid. One day in June he came home, but had difficulty opening the front door because there was a pile of 65 fines on the mat. In the days that followed, dozens more fines were received, increasing to more than 100 additional assessments worth around 10,000 euros.
“Let me start by saying: if you have a parking permit, it must be paid for, including the renewal,” says Hess. “But if that didn’t work out, I would have liked to receive a call and not all the fines at the same time three months later.”
‘Fine machine rattles on’
The Amsterdam ombudsman Ramlal says: “This entrepreneur makes one mistake, but the municipality’s fine machine continues to rattle on. This is a typical example in which the government system world collides with the living environment of the residents. Digitalization sometimes has truly Kafkaesque consequences. “
Fine avalanches are common in Amsterdam
The capital has calculated that in a four-month period (in 2022), at least 265 parking permit holders were faced with an avalanche of fines. In all cases, these people received multiple fines within a few days for one mistake. The causes:
Accidentally parked in the wrong permit area:
69
Parked in shopping street within permit area
11
Paid for the wrong area via parking app or machine
2
Parking permit revoked
42
Parking permit expired
13
Forgot to change license plate to new car
38
Parking permit not paid
27
Not registered, disabled and informal caregivers Register Parking
6
Not registered, business license by code
3
Customer passed away
5
Other
49
Total
265 victims
The core of the problem, according to Maxime Kazem, lawyer at objection agency Appjection, is that enforcement has been digitized through the use of scan cars, but the fines are still sent by post. As a result, it takes a few days to a few weeks before the affected citizen knows that he has made a mistake.
‘Small benefits affair’
But because scan cars drive through the streets daily and sometimes several times a day, the number of fines quickly increases. “Often the first fine is not sent to the person concerned until weeks later, meaning that someone is unaware of their mistake for a long time,” Kazem explains. “That person has then not had the opportunity to adjust their behavior.”
If victims object to the fines, most municipalities will waive a large portion. Yet Brahim de Jong of Skandara, a legal agency that lodges objections on behalf of victims, does not have a good word to say about the working methods of municipalities. “What we see here is actually the benefits affair in miniature, the municipality imposes a disproportionately high sanction and as a citizen you are at the mercy of a civil servant.”
Fine avalanches under a magnifying glass
At the request of RTL News, Rotterdam provides five examples of victims who were faced with an avalanche of fines in 2022:
120 fines for a Rotterdam resident who did not properly implement a change of address. 111 fines have been waived, he has 9 fines paid.
78 fines for a Rotterdam resident whose permit had expired. The municipality ultimately has it 76 destroyed.
55 fines for a Rotterdam resident whose permit had expired but who received incorrect information from the municipality. All 55 additional tax assessments have been erased.
47 fines for a Rotterdam resident in a year (reason unknown), in the end he only had to 6 to pay.
31 fines for a Rotterdam resident who receives his letters from the municipality via the MijnOverheid App, but did not know this. He had to 3 pay fines, 28 fines have been annulled.
Last year there were more than 1,000 in total in Rotterdam 230 permit holders who have more than 10 received parking fines. These are not just victims: they also include people who received many fines for other reasons. Think of people who do not recognize the authority of the government, or rental cars that are always parked incorrectly by other tenants.
According to parking expert Paul van Loon (Empaction consultancy), the mechanism by which municipalities send fines until citizens change their behavior also has a psychological reason. When parking enforcement officers still manually checked license plates and issued fines directly behind the windshield wiper, they had to deal with angry motorists on the street.
“Parking enforcement officers often received strong reactions on the street when issuing a fine, because everyone who was fined always thought they deserved an exception,” says Van Loon. “Parking enforcement officers defended themselves against this by not deviating from the rules and being equally strict for everyone, because arguments were not verifiable.”
Fine avalanches are harmful
Van Loon believes that this culture still prevails in the parking enforcement departments of many municipalities. “Dismissing due to a citizen’s mistake is sometimes seen as a defeat. It is not in the genes of parking enforcement officers to enter into a conversation and stop issuing fines for a while when something strange is going on.”
Professor of Transport Policy Bert van Wee (TU Delft) thinks it is bad that municipalities can issue fines until people raise the alarm themselves. “The parking system sees this as a series of violations, while the resident has often only made one mistake,” he says. According to Van Wee, these kinds of reflexes from municipalities are harmful to support for parking policy.
It can also be done differently. Of the major cities, the municipality of The Hague is the only one where the accumulation of parking fines hardly occurs because a solution seems to have been found here. In The Hague, the municipality’s scanning car automatically stops imposing additional assessments for two weeks after three fines. Most fines are paid within that time and the permit holder in question has time to ask the municipality for clarification.
Contact the municipality sooner
They are also trying to prevent fine avalanches in Breda. If someone has collected more than five fines per month, the municipality will try to make contact to check whether something has gone wrong. “In the event of an accidental incident, it is really our moral duty as a municipality to look at it humanely,” says responsible councilor Jeroen Bruijns of Breda.
Marianne van den Anker, ombudsman of Rotterdam, sees that change has also begun in Rotterdam. “It can no longer be the case that citizens have to sound the alarm via the ombudsman,” she says. “Residents are actively being called if they receive three fines. That is a positive development and hopefully the avalanches of fines will soon be a thing of the past.”
Remission
According to Amsterdam ombudsman Ramlal, picking up the phone is a logical solution to a persistent problem. “Municipalities sometimes say that they find this complicated, but it is also complicated to fly a plane from Amsterdam to New York and do that several times a day. It bothers me that municipal organizations have so little ability to do these kinds of things. prevent.”
2023-11-11 07:20:27
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