They're the parking cheats, the motorists who try to beat the meter, who want something for nothing.
But unfortunately for them, it seems the Tauranga City Council parking wardens might be one step ahead.
This story started when a small, common old, garden variety sedan slipped into a 60 minute angle park on the fringe of the CBD early one afternoon. Our husband and wife, or was it boyfriend and girlfriend, alight and the male made a feast of attaching what looked like an old parking ticket beneath the windscreen wiper. And then they jaunted off downtown.
But for every shyster there is a responsible citizen. And our informant who witnessed this story unfolding, checked the ticket which looked to be for an old $140 offence. 'They were obviously trying to deceive the parking officer, to make him think they were already ticketed, so they could get more parking time than they were entitled to.” Sneaky devils.
'This is a new one,” says Tauranga City Council's Stewart Goodman. 'Unfortunately for them, it's unlikely to work as officers remember vehicles they have ticketed that day. Also, when they scan a vehicle rego, it shows what infringements have been issued.” And the reason this individual didn't get a ticket was most likely because an officer wasn't patrolling that area at that particular time. Luck was with the perp this day.
It's not an offence to try to hoodwink a warden, but it is a gamble, because the infringement is always more expensive than the cost of parking.
Fee dodgers get up to all sorts of chicanery to beat the system. The most obvious and popular one is simply rubbing off parking wardens' chalk marks left on tyres. Or they play ‘musical cars' - constantly moving their car around to get around time restrictions. 'We have also had people go as far as taking a permanent marker to their license label,” says Stewart.
'On occasion, when people receive a ticket they will move their vehicles and send us a photo claiming they were wrongly ticketed. We explain that we also take a photo of every vehicle ticketed and they normally don't take the matter any further.”
That's a gotcha!