Auckland Transport is now using 20 cars to patrol the city with licence plate recognition. Photo: RNZ / Nick Monro
Some Aucklanders have been getting a nasty surprise in the mailbox - a parking ticket from an offence a few weeks ago.
Auckland Transport is using 20 cars to patrol the city with licence plate recognition.
They can do the job of parking wardens, but it means the offending driver does not know they were sprung until the ticket arrives in the post.
Since January, there was a 30 percent increase in the number of tickets handed out by the drive by ticket officers.
Some Auckland commuters said this new way of dishing out parking fines was unfair and said they had racked up hundreds of dollars of fines before they knew what hit them.
Josh Baxter is one of them - he was the first to admit that he and his co-workers in Parnell had not always followed the parking rules.
They would pay a few dollars at the metre at a time and move their cars to avoid getting stung by parking wardens.
But when the licence plate recognition cars started enforcing parking in the area, they quickly racked up hundreds of dollars in fines all at once.
"I've received 10 tickets in the mail over two weeks. They all came, more or less, a month after the actual offence date. You feel a little cheated, and I know it's like you haven't paid so fair enough. But I suppose it's the lack of opportunity to know that you've done something wrong."
The fines cost $40 each so Baxter was looking at $400 all up - which he said was a lot of money to come up with all at once.
Josh Baxter Photo: RNZ / Luka Forman
One of his co-workers got 13 tickets, he said.
"At the end of the day no one likes paying for parking, but this specifically just feels like a revenue collecting exercise."
Office workers Checkpoint spoke to in Auckland's CBD also felt getting parking fines in the mail, instead of under the wiper, could be a nasty surprise.
"It's a shock to the system, it's always nice to know you've got a fine when you get the fine", one person said.
"It's a lot easier when it's just on your car, and you know straight away," another said.
Auckland Transport's head of transport and parking compliance Rick Bidgood said the licence plate recognition cars allowed parking officers to cover much more ground as the city grew in population.
Bidgood said a group of suburbs which would take 21 officers to monitor on foot only took three drivers and one person to process the fines.
He had little sympathy for sneaky commuters who got hit with fines in the mail.
"Who chose to park illegally? Was it the driver or is it the vehicle? So I guess that lessons learned scenario - if you park in an area where you know you cannot park for free, that's a chance that you take."
Enforcing parking compliance in the city fringe suburbs opened up more parking spaces for residents, Bidgood said.
The cars had been in action for the last six-and-a-half years in small numbers, but Auckland Transport scaled up the operation to 20 cars at the end of last year.
It was possible that in the future they would be able to move away from sending the tickets from LPR cars in the post, he said.
"If we get the capability to send it out, either via and email or through an SMS message, that's something we could certainly look into doing - that wouldn't be a problem at all."
Parking Association chairperson John Purcell said another reason for using the plate recognition cars was to keep wardens safe from abuse.
"It's a growing area of concern for road controlling authorities around the country that parking officers are more frequently abused and involved in negative encounters."
He said at the end of the day, if commuters did not want to want to end up with unwanted fines they should follow the parking rules.