An article appeared recently on the website engadget:

Open data reveals dodgy NYPD parking ticket practices

New York City police were taking $1.7 million a year from drivers obeying parking laws.

By Jon Fingas From engadget

Open data policies in government don’t just exist for the sake of convenience — sometimes, they can reveal serious structural problems. I Quant NY’s Ben Wellington took advantage of both New York City’s open data and Google Maps to determine that the NYPD was issuing thousands of tickets on streets where parking is legal. While you’re allowed to park next to a pedestrian ramp as long as there’s no crosswalk, the police issued five or more tickets in 1,966 of these spots over the past 2.5 years. That’s over $1.7 million per year in fines against people who were obeying the law.

The good news? The open data really did lead to change. Wellington’s discoveries prompted the NYPD to investigate its practices, and it learned that only traffic agents got full training on the pedestrian ramp rule. Patrol officers didn’t — and to no one’s surprise, they were the ones writing most of the bad tickets. The force is now making sure that all officers understand the parking law, and it’s implementing a digital tracking system to catch these problems before they get out of hand. There’s no guarantee that other cities will be quite so willing to expose their inner workings, but this kind of data-driven progress suggests that they should.

Link: http://www.engadget.com/2016/05/11/open-data-reveals-dodgy-nypd-ticketing/

This is something some of our own RCIPS officers could do with. Understanding the law correctly when it comes to persons parking on the roadside and are issued with an obstruction tickets.

I know of, and I have personally received obstruction tickets that are ludicrous.

Under the Cayman Islands law a vehicular right of way must be a minimum of 12 feet wide. At my previous home we had a 12ft vehicular right of way over our land. We extended it to 20ft wide in line with the access road into our property the whole width of the driveway right down to the south boundary.

A tenant of ours received an obstruction ticket for parking his car wholly on our private right of way on our own land!

The widest SUV is 6ft and a car is 5 ½ ft. When the car is parked on even the smallest width road – 20ft you still get more than 12 feet!

And how many of us have received tickets for going through an amber light when if you were to stop immediately went from green to amber you would either be obstructing approaching traffic or pedestrians when there is often a crosswalk marked in front of the lights?

I can vouch to the anger one feels at receiving these dodgy traffic tickets. All due to poorly trained officers.