Double yellow lines.
A while back I lived in a flat by the sea, at the time we (as were all residents) allowed to park in the (council run) carpark opposite. Suddenly and without much notice, the council decided that we must pay, at a rate of about 2 quid an hour, to park there overnight.
Unsurprisingly, every single one of us refused, and simply parked on the double yellow lines (that lead to a private, locked-gated road - so hardly keeping the flow of traffic going).
Of course, we'd invariably get nicked for parking there.
On one such occassion, I decided to fight the ticket.
I took pics of the lines, that were by anyones standards in dire need of repainting. In places you couldn't even see the line at all, and there were no visible t-bars at either end etc....
I sent the pics and my appeal to the council. As they are the very people that decided the outcome of the appeal and the very same that get the money in the event that the appeal is unsuccessful, I had a letter back telling me that my appeal was, indeed, unsuccessful.
So...I waitied for my Notice To Owner. Apparenly this is a legal document that affords the Owner of the car 28 days to either pay up or make representations. The 28 days bit is set in law and is not open to interpretation. The date they typed the letter and the date they set me to pay by was 23 days.
I wrote back informing them that it was my legal right to be given 28 days to pay or appeal and again pointed out that the lines were barely visible etc... and that if - rather when - they threw this appeal out they should expect to go to an adjudicator.
I also put in a FOI request to the highways agency with regards to the lines being painted and when they were last checked.
I received a letter along the lines of..."On this occassion the matter will be dropped".
They then repainted all the lines.
Then the FOI request came back.
It turns out that the road in question is actually a private road that belongs to the British Legion club on the same road.
The cheeky twunts had been treating it as their own and fining people for parking there!
I nearly shat with laughter watching the poor bastards having to come back and paint over the yellow lines!
That'll teach the greedy fuckers (well, probably not, but it still feels good to know that they won't be ripping anyone else off).
(dchurch bah, Wed 16 Feb 2011, 16:17, 5 replies)

Warm glow
nice

click
(SpangoTheWonderBadger is brewing beer, Wed 16 Feb 2011, 16:51, closed)

Excellent.
*click*
( Fathter Puddytat Kill Kill dat widdle boid is mine on, Wed 16 Feb 2011, 18:09, closed)

click
Good effort
(DownhillGardener no-one does it like that anymore, Wed 16 Feb 2011, 20:42, closed)

I got done a while back
Single yellow line, but ticketed for causing an obstruction because I was parked with two wheels on the pavement. Pavement which ends in a muddy grass bank six feet further on, so who I was obstructing I don't know. Anyway...
Fast forward a few months and I see another car parked there. All four wheels on the road. Ticket on the windscreen. Nipped into the office and printed out some details regarding legal requirements for yellow lines (the fact that they should be T-barred at the end, for example, whereas this one had a big gob of paint and that's it). Left it under the windscreen wiper, next to the ticket.

I like to think that I had a small victory in getting someone else off a parking ticket, presumably it was successful as they repainted the line a few months later.
( eXOBeX, Thu 17 Feb 2011, 0:05, closed)

After
I got the 'no further action' letter, I pinned everything up in order of correspondence on the message board in the RBL on the same road (this was before it became apparent that they actually owned the road) so that others could use the same tactics - living there, I saw the scummers put tickets on their cars nearly every bloody week!
They actually knocked back the t-bar/non visible/broken lines argument - which I expected on the first appeal to be honest; it was the Notice to Owner and the 28 day thing that I think got them!
(dchurch bah, Thu 17 Feb 2011, 7:54, closed)