Scanning cars have taken over the work of parking attendants in most major municipalities over the past ten years. The inspections are done entirely digitally using cameras that automatically scan the license plates of parked cars. This way, many license plates can be scanned per hour, increasing revenue and reducing parking hassle.

But research by RTL Nieuws shows that a small group of motorists has been seriously affected by the digitization of parking enforcement. A tour of major municipalities shows that hundreds of people every year who make a mistake when renewing, paying or modifying a parking permit are subject to fines.

Financial pressures

“Most people end up waiving some of the fines if they explain their mistake, but then more months go by, with all the financial stress that entails,” says Munish Ramlal, an ombudsman in Amsterdam. “This world is upside down, and municipalities must try to prevent their citizens from ending up in this situation.”

It usually starts with a simple mistake by the citizen himself. For example, an 80-year-old couple from Rotterdam bought a new car this spring, but forgot to pass the corresponding new license plate to the municipal parking department in order to amend the permit.

The first fines soon followed. The elderly, who are not good with computers, sent a letter to the municipality, but it ended up going to the wrong official. Meanwhile, the fines continued to pour in. The fines only stopped when the Ombudsman in Rotterdam intervened. Then the counter reached 42 additional assessments worth around 3,000 euros.

Expand the parking area

An Amsterdam resident received 59 fines in a short time because he mistakenly entered the license plate of his loaner car instead of the license plate of the rental car. In the municipality of Almere, things got worse for a whole group of residents when the paid parking area was expanded in 2022. Dozens of residents of these neighborhoods did not know about this, and from 10 to 61 fines were issued in a few weeks.

It also started with a mistake made by Amsterdam transport businessman Koike Hesse. The payment voucher for his parking permit was sent to an address that did not exist, leaving the monthly bill unpaid. One day in June, he came home, but had difficulty opening the front door because there was a pile of 65 fines on the carpet. In the days that followed, dozens of additional fines were received, increasing to more than 100 additional assessments worth around €10,000.

“Let me start by saying: If you have a parking permit, it has to be paid for, including renewal,” Hess says. “But if it didn’t work out, I would have liked to get a call and not all the fines at the same time three months later.”

“Good vibrating machine”

“This businessman makes one mistake, but the good municipal machine keeps shaking,” says Ramlal, the Amsterdam ombudsman. “This is a typical example in which the world of government system collides with the living environment of the population. Sometimes digitalization has truly Kafkaesque consequences.”

Beautiful avalanches are common in Amsterdam

DC calculated that over a four-month period (in 2022), at least 265 parking permit holders faced an avalanche of fines. In all cases, these people received multiple fines within a few days for a single error. the reasons:

The crux of the problem, according to Maxime Kazem, a lawyer at the objection agency Appjection, is that enforcement has been digitized through the use of scanning cars, but fines are still sent by post. As a result, it takes a few days to a few weeks before the affected citizen knows that he or she has made a mistake.

“The issue of small interest”

But since inspection cars drive the streets every day and sometimes several times a day, the number of fines is rapidly increasing. “Often, the first fine is not sent to the person concerned until weeks later, meaning the person does not realize their mistake for a long time,” Kazim explains. “This person did not then have the opportunity to modify his behavior.”

If victims object to the fines, most municipalities will waive a significant portion of them. However, Ibrahim de Jong, of Skandara, a legal agency that lodges objections on behalf of victims, does not have a good word to say about the working methods of municipalities. “What we see here is actually an issue of micro-benefits, where the municipality imposes a disproportionately high penalty, and as a citizen you are at the mercy of a public servant.”

Beautiful avalanches under a magnifying glass

At the request of RTL News, Rotterdam provides five examples of victims who faced a torrent of fines in 2022:

120 Fines for a Rotterdam resident who did not execute a change of address correctly. 111 Fines have been waived 9 Fines paid.

78 Fines for a Rotterdam resident whose permit has expired. The municipality ultimately owns it 76 Destroyed.

55 Fines for a Rotterdam resident whose permit has expired but who received incorrect information from the municipality. everyone 55 Additional tax assessments have been cleared.

47 One Rotterdam resident received fines within a year (reason unknown), and in the end all he had to do was 6 To pay.

31 Fines for a Rotterdam resident who received his letters from the municipality via the MijnOverheid app but did not know about it. It had to 3 pay fines, 28 Fines have been cancelled.

Last year there were more than 1,000 in total in Rotterdam 230 Permit holders who have more than 10 Received parking fines. These are not just victims: they also include people who have received numerous fines for other reasons. Think about people who don’t recognize government authority, or rental cars that are always parked incorrectly by other renters.

According to parking expert Paul van Loon (Impaction Consulting), the mechanism through which municipalities send out fines so that citizens change their behavior also has a psychological reason. When parking enforcement officers still manually checked license plates and issued fines right behind a windshield wiper, they had to deal with angry motorists on the street.

“Parking enforcement officers often receive strong reactions on the street when issuing a fine, because whoever is fined always believes they deserve an exception,” says Van Loon. “Parking enforcement officers defended themselves against this by not deviating from the rules and being equally strict with everyone, because the arguments were not verifiable.”

Beautiful avalanches are harmful

Van Loon believes this culture is still prevalent in parking enforcement departments in many municipalities. “Getting fired for citizen error is sometimes viewed as a defeat. It’s not in the DNA of parking enforcement officers to engage in a conversation and stop issuing fines for a while when something strange happens.”

Transport policy professor Bert van Wee (TU Delft) believes it is bad that municipalities can issue fines so that people will raise the alarm themselves. He added: “The parking system sees this as a series of violations, while the resident often commits only one mistake.” According to Van Wee, this type of reaction from municipalities hurts support for parking policy.

It can also be done differently. Among the big cities, The Hague Municipality is the only one where the accumulation of parking fines rarely occurs because it seems that a solution has been found here. In The Hague, the municipal survey vehicle automatically stops imposing additional assessments for two weeks after three fines. Most fines are paid within that period, and the permit holder has sufficient time to seek clarification from the municipality.

Contact the municipality urgently

They also try to prevent good avalanches in Breda. If someone collects more than five fines per month, the municipality will try to contact them to check if something is wrong. “If an accident occurs, it is our moral duty as a municipality to look at the matter in a humane way,” says responsible councilor Jeroen Bruins from Breda.

Marianne van den Anker, Rotterdam’s ombudsman, believes that change has also begun in Rotterdam. “Citizens can no longer have to sound the alarm through the ombudsman,” she says. “Residents are actively summoned if they receive three fines. This is a positive development and we hope that the torrent of fines will soon become a thing of the past.”

forgiveness

According to Amsterdam Ombudsman Ramlal, picking up the phone is the logical solution to an ongoing problem. “Municipalities sometimes say they find this complicated, but it’s also complicated to fly from Amsterdam to New York and do it several times a day. It bothers me that municipal organizations have so little capacity to do these kinds of things.”