NO PARKING, PLEASE!

May 26, 2011 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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One day a man is late for a meeting. He is looking for a parking place, and cannot find any. In desperation, he looks to the heavens and prays, “Lord, if you find me a parking place, I promise to never drink, smoke or be adulterous again.”
Miraculously, a place opens up just in front of him. He turns his face up to the heavens and says, “Never mind, I just found one.”
Finding a parking space in the city can be a nightmare. With the growth of vehicles it becomes all the more difficult. And to compound matters there is limited paid private parking. The only known private parking lot is located just opposite a commercial bank and charges reasonable rates to park.
Interestingly, while law abiding motorists are forced to circle the block in search of a parking, hire cars are allowed to park their vehicles in no parking lanes right opposite the very bank. This makes a mockery of the system and one has to ask how this practice could be condoned.
There used to be time when for security reasons no parking at all was allowed outside any commercial bank. This practice has stopped because of the limited parking available. As such, outside of most commercial banks, you can park your vehicle provided someone, including venders are not occupying the space.
However, there are hire cars that are openly flouting the ‘no parking’ signs and are parking acre-free and unbothered in no parking zones. One has to ask what has happened to the traffic cops that are required to enforce the no-parking laws. How can these hire cars be parked with such impunity on no-parking signs?
A few months ago, we read about the police applying wheel clamps on vehicles that were unlawfully parked. It however seems that the campaign has taken a recess because you can still find persons flouting the no-parking laws and even parking in the zones reserved for minibuses to drop off and pick up their passengers.
In the United States of America, traffic cops simply write a ticket and paste it under the windscreen wiper.
There reminds me of a time when I went into a store for a few minutes. When I stepped out I saw a traffic cop writing a parking ticket. So I went up to him and said, “Come on buddy, how about giving a guy a break?’
He ignored me and continued writing the ticket. So I called him an idiot. He glared at me and started writing another ticket for defective tires.
I let out another insult at him. He wrote a third ticket. The more I insulted him the more tickets he wrote, all the time placing them under the windscreen wiper. In all he must have written about ten tickets.
I did not care. My car was parked around the corner.
There are times of course when the roles are reversed and the police can infuriate you, especially when they themselves seem to not understand their own regulations.
Take for example outside the Central Passport Office. It should be named The Passport Office because there is no other passport office. Outside of the building there are no signs urging motorists not to park between the signs. On the road surface itself is painted boldly but slightly faded, “ No Parking”.
Yet some of the very staff from the very office park their vehicles on the parapet alongside the no parking sign. It is as if they saying that the No Parking Sign applies only to the road surface, so that once you park off the road surface you are not in breach of the law. And to think that some of these persons are actually police ranks.
Once there is a no parking sign, it cannot be interpreted to mean that the prohibition only applies to the road surface. It means that there should be no parking on that side of the street be it on the road or on the grass verge. I urge the Commissioner of Police to take a serious look at this situation because the same thing is happening outside of the law courts.
There is a court order prohibiting the parking of vehicles on the eastern side of the western carriageway of Avenue of the Republic just opposite the Courts. There used to be a bus park here but there is no longer a bus park because this had to be removed to comply with the Court order.
Yet each day vehicles can be seen parked on the verges of the road where the no parking sign is. Surely, this amounts to a creative interpretation of the law.
But it does not end there. There are vehicles that are allowed to park on the pavements that run alongside the General Post Office Building. This is not a case of the vehicle straddling the pavement with two wheels on the pavement and two wheels off. Instead what we have are vehicles parked entirely on these pavements, and this has been going on for years.
If the traffic authorities cannot see that this is in violation of the law, then how can they be charging people, as they once did, for jaywalking? If some pavements are being used for parking, if outside of the passport office vehicles are parked off the road alongside a no parking area, then why should the police bother issuing tickets for illegal parking?

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