1500 parking tickets issued in Wellington due to faulty sensors

Parking sensors that are meant to record whether someone has stayed in a parking space longer than the maximum time have wrongly caused 1519 vehicles to be ticketed. Photo / File

More than 1500 parking tickets have been waived for Wellingtonians this year thanks to faulty parking sensors.

Parking sensors that are meant to record whether someone has stayed in a parking space longer than the maximum time have wrongly caused 1519 vehicles to be ticketed between January and November this year, Fairfax reported.

Wellington City Council told Fairfax the sensors were not resetting after a car left the parking space.

The 3500 sensors were installed by the council across the city in 2016.

In a statement to Fairfax, the council "strongly encouraged" people to contact them when they believed they'd been wrongly fined.

Council staff would not be able to tell which sensors were faulty until they were notified by the public.

"As with any electronic system dependent on wireless communications, we experience unanticipated faults [and] technical issues," the statement said.

One city councillor told Fairfax the "honest majority" of sensors could be relied on.

"There's always going to be a little teething problem here and there when you have new technology," said the council's transport portfolio leader Chris Calvi-Freeman.

"This is new technology for us and I think it's working really well."

Meanwhile a council spokeswoman told Fairfax the number of errors was "significantly lower" than when the sensors were first put in, and "well below" the predicted error rate.

"As with all technology, the system is constantly being improved and monitored."