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Overzealous ticketing at schools is ridiculous

Surrey - The Editor, I am a parent. Like many other parents, my children go to school. Like many other parents, I drive my kids to school because we live too far to walk. Like many other parents, I scramble every morning to find sufficient and legal places to park. And like many other parents, I recently got a ticket for apparently parking incorrectly where there was no signage that said otherwise - somewhere I, and many others, have been parking for 10 months straight. Yet I got a ticket the other day, along with 12 others.

 

I had been warned that there was an overzealous, outsourced parking enforcer. I had been warned that he sits and waits for the 10 minutes that parents come every morning and afternoon.

 

He is well-known in our little parental community. Just the other day, a parent said this same parking enforcer gave him a ticket while he was sitting in his car - with it still on - just having arrived.

 

So, City of Surrey engineering and parking bylaw departments - when are you going to smarten up and start building schools and neighbourhoods that actually reflect the amount of traffic they actually get? When are you going to build schools that actually have parking areas that reflect the growing number of students flooding in twice a day? When are you going to provide adequate signage so that people aren't ticketed when it is unclear what the correct procedure is? And when are you going to employ competent city bylaw officers who would take into consideration the whole situation rather than outsource to a company that obviously uses a quota system to get as many tickets out as possible? Signed, an annoyed parent who is going to be fighting a really stupid ticket from an overzealous, outsourced parking enforcer.

 

Jessica Leslie

 

Surrey