Simon cracks down on the parking fraudsters

How does a parking inspector see the hologram while the ticket is sitting on the dash?

I’m with swaggie – if they are catching the poeple who have been forging the tickets what’s the problem? Surely the fines they impose more than make up for the few dodgy ones that they miss – and all at no extra cost to Parking Operations.

I can’t wait for next week when the machines stuff up trying to print on this new fangled fancy hippie techo paper….

And what about the privately owned car parks – like Sect 63? Will they have to purchase new paper as well?

PM said :

What about tartan tickets?

No, talk of plans to introduce tartan tickets has been scotched.

I am pretty sure that the plasticised holographic strip and/or magnetic strip are no problem for the paper recycling systems. They have to be able to deal with a certain amount of contamination.

What about tartan tickets?

“Mælinar – *spoiler alert* I’ve seen S04E13”

S4E13 of what?

very environmentally friendly. I recycle my tickets at present, do they expect me to rip the metal out of each one. Very smart.
Even the shopping centres are getting rid of magnetic strips making them easier to recycle.

Sounds like a good idea but what about the cost of:
– The up keep of all those machines with large moving parts
– The cost of fencing of all the car parks
– The cost of 24 hour support for the machines (So many times i have seen the ones at the malls not working properly so an attendant needs to come and fix it)
– There would still need to be parking inspectors to check that people were parking legally inside the car park

When you add all of that up I think you will find the reason why they are not done that way.

I do think the idea of coloured strips that change randomly through the week is a nice clean and simple answer. Though I think you would find that it is probably cheaper to add a hologram section to the current tickets, than it would be to modify all the machines to print coloured panels.

Country towns don’t need pay parking. Neither do Governments lollygagging at the amount of money they are making off ‘affordable land releases’.

The whole pay parking issue for larger car parks is easily solved.

Do exactly what the airport and shopping centres (eg the Canberra Centre) have been doing for ages. Take a ticket as you go in and pay for the time you have actually used before you go out.

If you want to make sure a car park is used for short stay, you set the price as something reasonable for the desired period and if individuals run over time then they pay a premium rate to redeem their exit voucher.

I’ll guarantee you if the first 2 hours of parking was a total of say $2.00, but each hour after (or part thereof) was $10.00, people would soon get the idea and the government would make far more money from this instead of randomly identifying the odd car that had gone over time by issuing a parking infringement.

Golly. If you’re going to do forgeries, at least do good ones.

I’ve been wondering why the ACT parking people don’t (a) use different colours for differently priced carparks (to stop the pay $5 and park in a $9 place scam) and (b) sometimes vary the strip that comes out so that non-genuine tickets would be obvious. But that may require precisely the characteristics for which parking people are not famous.

PM said :

Where does Simon park?

wherever his act govt plated car fits.

“There has been a significant increase in the number of forged paid parking tickets found on vehicles in ACT Government operated car parks.” So….. if they’re finding them why bother introducing new tickets at all?

Whilst I’m not anti-stampdown, as I park in one of these carparks legally, it is somewhat amusing…

JB’s reference to the DPP search is amusing, too… Check this one:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/07/28/2317083.htm

Apparently it’s “not my fault”

Where does Simon park?

This is the real problem:

“The Office of Regulatory Services has recently issued a number of Parking Infringement Notices to motorists for displaying fraudulent parking tickets,” Attorney General Simon Corbell said.

They should be charging them with fraud – make the cost of getting caught sufficiently high. Technological prophylactics are seldom a magic bullet – in this case detection and response would seem to be a more cost-effective solution.

Good on them. I’m enjoying the amount of extra parking spaces in Section63 since they started cracking down on the non-payers

Excellent! I wish I had thought of this ages ago!

What a joke. Get a life Corbell.

jimbocool said :

I think these parking tickets are already in use in Phillip – they are indeed very pretty but the strip is more a platinum colour (with pretty sparkly bits) than black. Nothing that a good colour photocopier/printer combined with a visit to the Art Shop and tinted windows can’t handle though.

art shop has closed.

but the new store that replaced it in phillip looks interesting….

wonder if quickcopy will print me a batch?

I think these parking tickets are already in use in Phillip – they are indeed very pretty but the strip is more a platinum colour (with pretty sparkly bits) than black. Nothing that a good colour photocopier/printer combined with a visit to the Art Shop and tinted windows can’t handle though.

My first thought was – how much will that cause the tickets to increase by… second thought was how long will it take an 10yr old with said computer and aluminum foil to reproduce one!