• Vincent won’t stand for this nonsense anymore.

Fine threat for ticket hoarders

CLEAR out your dashboard daily: Under a new Vincent council bylaw, drivers who leave old parking tickets on their dashes will now face a $70 fine.

The council’s rejigging its parking laws to bring the language up-to-date for mobile phone parking apps, but another amendment bans expired tickets “visible from outside the vehicle”.

Ticket hoarders force parking inspectors to check the lot in the hope of finding a valid ticket lurking among them.

There’s even online memes suggesting spiteful parkers do it deliberately, hoping the inspectors tire of poring over the pile and move on. One meme shows a ticket-ridden dashboard carrying the caption: “How to ruin a traffic warden’s day”.

Some jurisdictions already have rules preventing those shenanigans: The City of London’s parking bobbies have no time for spotting games and stick a fine on any car if they can see more than a single ticket.

London’s online parking FAQ addresses those claiming they were fined even though they had a valid ticket: “Perhaps other out-dated tickets were also visible through your windscreen,” it says, Englishly.

Vincent’s rule just bans “expired” tickets, along with the existing ban on displaying defaced, altered, or “obliterated” tickets.

You can still display multiple tickets if you bought them at the same time (if you accidentally buy one ticket but realise you need longer and buy a second ticket, rangers will continue to add the time of both of them together).

The new rules were advertised in August and September but no submissions were received, and it now goes off to be gazetted by the state government.

by DAVID BELL