Paul Little: Parents park those complaints

A Ponsonby father was recently fined twice within a few minutes for parking illegally while picking up his son from school.

First he was fined $60 for parking on a yellow line, then $40 for parking across a driveway when the yellow line lost its appeal and he moved across the road.

Unless a fairy at his christening gave him the gift of exemption for life from parking regulations, the phrase "it's a fair cop" comes to mind.

But Nigel King gathered up his umbrage and took it to the media.

"I guess Auckland Transport have realised this is a bit of a cash cow - fine parents picking up their kids from school," he lamented.

Actually he was fined for parking offences.

No one has ever been fined for picking up their kids from school.

And I know a $60 fine here and a $40 fine there add up, but AT would have to issue a few hundred a day for the practice to have a useful effect on its bottom line.

I don't know how much of a dent those fines will make in King's family budget, but he's a real estate agent who lives in the Ponsonby Primary zone, so my guess is it won't drive him to make a false benefit claim to feed his family.

According to school principal Dr Anne Malcolm, parents bring "probably 200 cars" a day to ferry their bairns to the best education the free public school system can provide.

Of course in my day, with the odd exception, the majority of parents and children had legs with feet attached that they used to get to and from school. Cars didn't really come into it.

I worry we have raised a generation of parents cocooned in cotton wool and unable to deal with the rough and tumble of finding a legitimate parking space and walking 100m or so to deliver their children to the school gate.

So there's nothing unusual about Mr King, except he talked at length to a journalist about this.

My view may be coloured by years spent living at the end of a long driveway opposite a densely populated inner-city primary school.

Well, I call it a driveway entrance.

From 8.30-9am and 2.45-3.15pm it was really a five-minute pick-up/drop-off zone.

Every morning and afternoon a motorcade of black vehicles, each larger than anyone needs to own unless they have to transport livestock on a daily basis, would swell to presidential proportions and clog up our street as they moved at funereal pace past the school gates.

Coffee cups in one hand, cellphones and steering wheels in the other, parents stopped only long enough to expel their children on to the footpath or, not infrequently, into the road, where the doughty moppets began their school day with a bracing game of chicken.

Occasionally the parents refused to fit the stereotype of the stressed modern urbanite and double parked, motors running, to enjoy a leisurely conversation about tennis plans for later in the day or about how good their hair looked.

To be fair, there would be a car blocking my driveway only two or three times a week. And many of those would move on after I had sounded my horn just two or three times.

A minority suffered from hearing impairment and a spinal defect that prevented them turning around to see me until their child was actually in the vehicle.

Then I could move out into our narrow street and proceed in an orderly fashion, trying very hard not to hit someone else's child.