Did you see the comment someone left last week about her car being clamped and towed away after she parked in the Approach, Rayleigh? If not, have a look ; it’s well worth reading.
The Approach is the road that goes behind Rayleigh Station. Just to summarise what happened, the driver left her vehicle on the highway at the very end of the road, near where the car is parked in the photo below. There was some clamping warning notices nearby – but they were adjacent to the block-paving of the homes there. However the clampers towed her car away, and she ended up paying about ?560 to get it back, in what was clearly a very bad experience.
So what’s going on here? Well, the very end of the road is an unadopted highway. So County Highways can’t put yellow lines here. As a consequence, it seems that the residents here have been troubled by conatant parking outsie their homes, and have invited in the clampers to solve their problem.
But before we get 100 messages from residents in Priory Chase, which is also unadopted, to be able to bring in clampers, the road has to be a private road, as opposed to being an unadopted public highway.. Priory Chase is an unadopted public highway
Chris Black took senior Conservative councillor Keith Hudson down to look at the location (nice bit of inter-party co-operation there, Keith , thank you) and Keith agrees that it isn’t clear at all that the clampers are referring to the highway as well as the block paving. We have asked for some signing to go in as a matter of urgency.
The question is, is this bit of road in the Approach actually a private road? We have asked the question and are waiting for a response.
in the pic of the clamping sine, at the bottom it say’s Volenti non fit injuria.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volenti_non_fit_injuria
Volenti non fit injuria (Latin: “to a willing person, no injury is done” or “no injury is done to a person who consents”) is a common law doctrine which means that if someone willingly places themselves in a position where harm might result, knowing that some degree of harm might result, they cannot then sue if harm does in fact happen. The ‘volenti’ only applies to the risk which a reasonable person would consider them as having assumed by their actions; thus a boxer consents to being hit, and to the injuries that might be expected from being hit, but is not a ‘volenti’ if (for example) his opponent should swing an iron bar at him, or punch him outside the usual terms of boxing. Volenti is also known as a “voluntary assumption of risk”.
‘Volenti’ is sometimes described as the plaintiff “consenting to run a risk”. In this context, ‘volenti’ can be distinguished from legal consent in that the latter can prevent some torts arising in the first place (for example, consent to a medical procedure prevents the procedure from being a trespass to the person, or consenting to a person visiting your land prevents them from being a trespasser).
http://www.workplacelaw.net/forums/memberPosts/id/120593
this is a link to a site were a comment was posted by same one going to the County Court with a cases against Premiwer Parking Services. it has same usful info within it. this was in Jul 2008
While having sympathy for residents who can not get on or off there driveways I think that £560 is far excessive. I believe a normal parking fine is around £30.
I wonder – if that piece of road does prove to be public highway – how quickly will the clampers refund money to the owners of cars that they illegally clamped and/or removed?
On the subject of parking, I would like to raise one of my (many) pet hates.
Whilst making use of our wonderful High Street yesterday afternoon, I parked my car in Webster’s Way carpark. I knew I only needed about half an hour, so needed to purchase a 1 hour ticket. It is at this point that I realise I do not have the correct change for the 60p fee, so had to use a £1 coin.
Why is it that parking machines cannot give change? Vending machine technology has been fully capable of giving change for decades, but for some reason parking machines seem to have missed out. So my fee to park was actually 66% higher than it should have been, just because I didn’t have any change.
If my newsagent refused to give me my correct change every time I bought my newspaper, I would not buy my newspaper from him. I would possibly report him to trading standards as well. Why should the council be allowed to do this when I pay for a parking space?
You don’t even get proportionally extra time for the amount you over-paid – If I had been 10 minutes late getting back to the car I could still receive a penalty fine.
This is clearly a deliberate action to extract more revenue out of drivers who wish to park in the town. The only reason that this practice is allowed is because anyone using a carpark is obviously a member of an extremist group called “motorists”, and thus ranked somewhere between Genghis Khan and Satan in popularity ratings used by political bodies. As such it’s okay to make them pay.
I accept that sometimes a parking machine may not have the correct change, but to automatically refuse to give change is a con. This is particularly so with Pay-And-Display, where it is clear that someone who has yet to visit the shops is less likely to have the exact money for their parking.