Private parking

The fact is that in most regions of this country private parking spaces are valuable commodities. There is a high and rising demand that is not matched by supply.

The owner of private property therefore owes it to himself and those to whom he bears a responsibility to so arrange the private parking facilities on his grounds that unauthorised people are excluded, if not physically, then because of unhappy consequences after parking where angels fear to tread.

The bad/good news is that the clamping option is about to depart our lives. An act of Parliament the LibDems are piloting through the Houses will make wheel clamping illegal and it will be law in a matter of weeks, or months.

The large car park owner has exciting options to choose from to deter unauthorised private parking, in other words, on non-public parking spaces.

He can use a boom gate in which the motorist receives a timed chit from an attendant or a machine at the point of entry and, when he goes, pays an attendant or a machine for having used a space based on elapsed time.

The motorist simply swipes a credit/debit card to be permitted to enter and does the same thing to exit; what the system deducts from his account rests on the elapsed time. Have the variation of the above with what in Hong Kong is called a ‘schroff office.’

Get the motorist to pay at the point of entry for all-day parking; what he pays out is non-time sensitive – provided the entry and exit are both in the same 24 hour cycle. Really big players might want to use parking meters.

But, really, the average Joe Public with a few highly treasured square metres of parking spaces on his property wants to deter unauthorised private parking without the above monumental manoeuvres.

Well, a company called Flashpark does assist JP by asking him, if he is a registered customer, to take an identifying quality snapshot of the vehicle in question, emailing the same to Flashpark and the company does the rest via its licensed access to the DVLA register. The irate property owner even gets to share the resulting fine with Flashpark. We trust you find my effort useful.