If a car is caught for a second time within 12 months of the first ticket, there is no period of grace. Photo / File
If a car is caught for a second time within 12 months of the first ticket, there is no period of grace. Photo / File
A roadside survey has revealed that nearly 9 per cent of cars being driven on Tauranga roads do not have a current registration.
The unscientific survey, carried out yesterday by the Bay of Plenty Times Weekend, involved 326 parked cars at different locations, from the city centre to Greerton. Noneof the 28 cars found with expired regos had expired warrants of fitness, meaning they should have been safe.
Tauranga downtown's street-front carparks emerged with the lowest rate of lapsed regos - only 3 per cent of the 100 cars checked in the Durham St/ Elizabeth St/ Grey St/ Spring St block.
Yesterday's survey did not cover the big privately owned customer carparks like Fraser Cove and Bayfair, which are favoured by people driving unregistered cars because they know they will not get pinged by council parking wardens. The wardens also check for expired warrants of fitness and regos.
Nearly 11 per cent of the 123 cars checked in Greerton shopping centre's Chadwick Rd and surrounding streets had expired regos. But the biggest statistical blip was in Merivale, where four of the 10 cars parked along the shopping centre frontage did not have a current rego.
Te Papa/Welcome Bay city councillor Bill Grainger said he was a little surprised at the amount of lapsed registrations.
"Things are tough these days and people are finding it hard to make ends meet.'
He speculated that some people may have been waiting for July 1 and not realised it had gone by. Many car owners had timed their regos to expire close to July 1 so they could cash in on savings of $40 to $170 on the ACC levies component.
The oldest expired rego was January 1, 2015. Eight of the 28 expired regos were older than one month.
Te Papa/Welcome Bay city councillor Bill Grainger said he was a little surprised at the amount of lapsed registrations. Photo / Joel Ford
Cr Grainger successfully pushed for a two-month grace period for people caught by council parking wardens with expired warrants and regos. It meant that anyone whose vehicle was unwarranted or unregistered for up to two months escaped paying a $200 fine, provided they could make their car legal within 14 days.
However, many people did not realise that, if they were caught for a second time within 12 months of the first ticket, there was no period of grace, he said.
Heather Jones, whose job running Aegis Security put her in situations where she acted as security for events involving parked cars, said she had noticed a "phenomenal" number of unregistered cars.
She was involved in a crash three months ago, when her car was rear-ended after stopping to make a left turn from Maranui St into Girven Rd. When Mrs Jones phoned the police, the woman driver gave her a "a mouthful of verbal abuse", saying she was running late for work. "I then noticed she had no warrant of fitness and registration."
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