"Wanderer" wrote in message
...
On 4 Aug 2003 03:44:26 -0700, AOL's down again... wrote:

Hi folks.

On saturday last, I got a parking ticket in the delightful London
borough of Southwark. The ticket was issued by APCOA Parking for and
on behalf of the aforementioned London Borough. I was parked in a bay
marked "PERMIT HOLDERS ONLY MON-FRI 8am - 6pm". The ticket states that
the attendant believed I was "PARKED IN A PERMIT BAY WITHOUT
DISPLAYING A VALID PERMIT".

Clearly, as this happened on a saturday, I don't want to pay the £100
fine, nor do I want to pay the "reduced" £50 charge for paying within
14 days.

Are you satisfied that the details on the ticket are correctly entered?
Has
the warden put the correct date down? If everything is correctly entered,
then I'd sit on it until you get the relevant notice to owner, but if
they're not then at best he could be acting dishonestly or fraudulently,
and I think I'd want a solicitor's opinion on that! Do you have a legal
assistance option on your car or house insurance? You might be able to get
some free legal advice that way.

The difficulty arises if the warden *has* entered the wrong date (eg the
date of a weekday) - how do you prove that you weren't parked there on that
weekday? You may be able to prove that you were somewhere else, but you may
not. Tricky. In any dispute, you could ask to see the warden's record of
tickets issued. I nearly got a ticket for staying longer than the permitted
time in a bay that allowed 2 hours free parking. Since I'd only been 1/2
hour, I was miffed to find a warden about to ticket me. Of course he
couldn't produce a record that he'd first noticed my car two hours ago, so
(with VERY bad grace) he wandered off. I should have taken the matter
further, but I was in a hurry to be somewhere else.

If the date is correct (Saturday) you should have no problem getting the
ticket cancelled. A grovelling apology from the warden would be a nice
bonus! ;-)