Traffic Wardens

Is there any creature more universally loathed in the mythology of all big cities than a traffic warden?  I kinda doubt it.  On the moving-in and moving-out days at my first hall of residence, the traffic wardens of Islington seemed to have some magical power that led them to zoom in without fail, dozens at a time, to penalize every single car that dared to park in front of the hall to drop off their kids.  Families that had driven hundreds of miles to deliver their kids to their first day of university found themselves variously ticketed, clamped, and towed, all in the space of time it took to get a clean change of socks and a teddy bear up from the street outside the residence to a room on the 8th floor.  I have never seen such a mean, miserable, miserly sight as gaggles of traffic wardens swarming in to slap fines of over a hundred quid on a proud parent who’d been parked for less than ten minutes to deliver their kids, and not reason nor appeals to emotional sympathy could persuade them otherwise.

My Dad, as the driver in the family, has a bitter on-going battle with traffic wardens.  He has perfected the art of the polite-yet-steely middle class letter of complaint, which, without wanting to imply that legal action is necessary, nevertheless makes it very clear that hear is an eloquant Radio 4 listener who’s just going to be more trouble than he’s worth.  However, this hasn’t stopped a local council for slapping him with a £120 fine for the day his car parked illegally in their borough.  Curiously enough, this was the same day that Dad was at work with a local charity, and the car did not leave Hackney all day or all night.  The cry of ‘numberplate fraud!’ was duly raised and now an intricate battle of suspicion, reasonable doubt and alibi-affirmation rages between a council stoutly refusing to conceed that it may be trying to rob an innocent man, and an ex-publisher with a knack for letter writing.

(On an entirely different, yet curiously related note, I discovered recently in a battle with my local council the existence of a thing called the ‘Postal Rule’ whereby if a council computer claims a letter was dispatched to a certain address on a certain day, that is considered valid evidence in court that it was so.  The only way to argue against this is by proving that you didn’t receive a letter.  Now… answers on a postcard please… how exactly do you go about proving that you haven’t received something?  Do you hold up the empty air where it should have been?)

Whether this is true for all traffic wardens in all cities, I do not know, but the vast majority of traffic wardens that I see around the centre of London are middle aged black ladies who look perfectly cheerful and pleasant to talk to – until you violate that double yellow line, of course.  Since I find it hard to imagine that the people who recruit traffic wardens have a personality test to determine your level of sympathy (lowest score wins), I can only assume that the people who run the traffic warden system as a whole have laid down a policy of go-get-’em-tiger which leads to the kind of swarms that attacked the families trying to unload at my halls of residence.   I was once told that traffic wardens receive extra money based on the number of cars that they manage to ticket – if this is the case (and I have yet to get this confirmed from a viable secondary source) then no wonder these perfectly decent members of the human race undergo such a magical transformation in the presence of an over-run ticket!

In matters such as this, a literal adherence to the word of the law becomes kinda more problematic… yes, these parents come from Leeds and Cardiff and, in one case, the Isle of Skye, were in violating of London parking regulations by being pulled up for more than five minutes on a single yellow line outside the halls of residence.  But they were not posing a threat to the public order and, more to the point, they were dropping off Little Tiddles for day 1 of university, an event as emotional as it is demanding on the size of the suitcase.  The law has them by the throat, and would duly find them guilty of pissing around with traffic regulations.  But in this case, tragically, the law, as enforced by the traffic wardens, is nothing if not a cruel cow.

On the other hand… traffic wardens notoriously suffer more shit from members of the public than any other member of the emergency services.  Angry drivers will do anything from shout abuse to spit to, on occasion, resort to physical violence against people who are, at the end of the day, just doing their job.  And yeah, it’s not exactly a happy thing when cars park parallel across Oxford Street and my Dad, for all that he writes those steely letters, has been rejoicing these last few years to have a residential parking scheme operating in his area.  Rejoicing, that is, were it not for the hundred plus pounds he has to spend a year for the honour of parking anywhere within a 2 mile radius of his front door…

I am, lets be honest here, trying to find some redeeming features in traffic wardens, since I feel it’s unfair to just condemn an entire profession off-hand, and, far worse, to condemn the people that work in it.  (Have none of us cheered when the guy with the big hair and the fast sports car gets ticketed for parking like a prat?)  But let’s face it, when it gets to the stage that, parking for a few moments to buy a round of fish and chips from your local residential chippy, you have to leave someone in the car to keep an eye out for the traffic wardens and, if necessary, circle round the block 5 times until they’re gone, you can’t help but feel this is a system running mad.

And oh yes…

… did I mention?  Randomly enough, traffic wardens may just prove to have their role to play in the life of Matthew Swift and the Midnight Mayor too…