The ticket masters! Edinburgh’s blue meanies hand out most parking f ines
...but you might get away with it in Glasgow
FOR the legions of drivers who have had an expensive encounter with the notorious Blue Meanies, it will come as no surprise.
For Edinburgh has been exposed as one of the worst cities in Britain for parking tickets, research shows.
In a single year, 208,523 tickets were handed out in the capital – equivalent to 40 per cent of the city’s population being fined. London is the only other UK city to dole out the fines at the same rate.
Glasgow, meanwhile, is the city where drivers are most likely to be successful in challenging a parking fine, with 5,469 of the 147,945 tickets issued in 2018 overturned.
Only 57 tickets were reversed in Edinburgh – 1 per cent of the number in Glasgow.
Neil Greig, of road safety charity IAM Roadsmart, said: ‘Parking has long been a contentious issue in Edinburgh and it would seem their legions of parking attendants are never backward in enforcing the rules as strictly as possible.
‘There is no doubt this is in part due to the pressure caused by the undersupply of parking bays, which also leads to unnecessary circulating traffic in the city centre looking for a space.
New car parks, such as the underground ones suggested for the historic squares, would help to alleviate this situation and bring down the numbers being caught.’
In Edinburgh and Glasgow, parking tickets are £60, cut to £30 if paid within 14 days. This means that even if all of the Edinburgh fines were paid early, they would have brought in £6.25 million.
Had the Glasgow drivers not challenged their fines, it would have earned the city at least £164,070. The parking tickets research, by car firm AMT and compiled from data obtained after freedom of information requests, shows how many parking charge notices were issued in cities across Britain during 2018.
Edinburgh is usually bustling with tourists as well as locals and parking is expensive, costing £4.20 an hour to leave your car on some streets.
Mr Greig said: ‘Slightly more positively, we can say that at least Edinburgh parking attendants are more likely to get the ticket right first time – clearly practice makes perfect.
‘More than 5,000 successful appeals in Glasgow would suggest they need to urgently improve their training programmes and ensure all their signposting and markings are in good condition.’
City of Edinburgh Council said money raised through parking fines was reinvested in the transport system.
The authority’s transport committee convener, Lesley Macinnes, said: ‘It’s essential we enforce parking restrictions to keep our city moving.
‘Notices are issued to drivers contravening restrictions to ensure that our busy roads are free of obstructions, as well as encouraging the turnover of spaces for businesses and visitors.
‘All of the income accrued from parking is invested back into our roads and transport infrastructure, including active travel improvements.’
AMT’s research also showed that Newcastle is the city where drivers are most likely to be given a ticket incorrectly.
Some 12,888 of the 19,654 fines that were appealed were successfully overturned – a hefty 66 per cent.
In Birmingham, the UK’s second biggest city with a population of 1.14 million, 136,820 drivers were fined.
You are least likely to get a parking ticket in Sheffield, where only 47,168 fines were handed out in the city of almost 600,000 people – about 8 per cent of the population.
‘City needs to urgently improve its training’