Transport Insights

Fair play to BBC news for reporting the positive side of a story about road safety that could have turned into one about unhappy drivers.

Parents back school parking crackdown

Parents have backed parking enforcement cameras outside their children’s school, after a council said it had issued hundreds of fines to those ignoring restrictions.

Great Coates Primary, near Grimsby, is among 12 schools in a CCTV scheme designed to ensure the safety of children at drop-off and pick-up times.

North East Lincolnshire Council issued a total of 924 penalty charge notices across the sites between the start of the year and August.

Hundreds of fines is often reported as suggesting that large numbers of people are being treated unfairly, particularly when you add in enforcement cameras.

But:

As parents settled back into the school routine following the summer holidays, most who spoke to the BBC said they supported the scheme.

The fly in the ointment is of course that every fine represents a driver who added to the risk of children going to school.

While the cameras here are used to enforce parking restrictions, they can also be used by councils with powers under Part 6 of The Traffic Management Act 2004 to enforce moving traffic violations, such as cars using streets where they have been banned during certain school-related hours.