Sonya Bateson: Fines should be based on a person’s income

I can’t imagine the kind of impact a $40 ticket would have on people worse off than myself, writes Sonya Bateson.

OPINION:

In these paperless days, getting mail is a rarity.

Like most responsible millennials, I have made every possible effort to ensure all important correspondence is sent via the easily ignorable medium of email. All in the name of saving the trees, of course. Certainly not for procrastination purposes, no sir-ee.

I recently realised it had been about a week (possibly even two) since I had last checked our mailbox, so I strolled leisurely down the driveway, opened it up, and was surprised to see an envelope inside.

Alas, it was not a letter nor a Christmas card. Do people even send those anymore?

No, friends, it was mail of the worst kind. A fine.

Yikes.

Turns out my trip to the Tauranga CBD a few weeks ago went on a bit too long. An hour over, to be precise. Procrastination isn’t just for correspondence, apparently.

But hey, always look on the bright side. I committed the crime mere days before parking fines were increased to $40, so it won’t cause too much trauma, although it will mean no latte for me this week.

I was telling a friend all about my idiocy, lamenting that I’d be avoiding the CBD like the plague to prevent earning another ticket. His response?

“Well, it’s still cheaper than parking in Auckland.”

Dear reader, I did a literal double-take. He wasn’t wrong, I suppose. But, still.

Forty dollars is a good portion of my family’s grocery budget. And while we’re not exactly destitute, we are on a tight budget. Losing $40 would hurt. I can’t imagine the kind of impact a $40 ticket would have on people worse off than myself.

It’s a privilege to have the ability to be blasé about an amount of money that can make or break other people.

And that brings me to an interesting thought: What’s the point of issuing fines if they’re only an effective deterrent for those on a low income?

For a cash-strapped university student, that $40 could be their entire food budget for a week. But for a working professional, that $40 could be easily paid off with an hour’s work. For the latter group, if you’re going to be in town for a few hours and are too lazy to manoeuvre through a parking building, it may feel worth gambling $40 on whether or not you’ll get pinged.

It’s less than parking in Auckland, right?

What’s more, there’s a new bylaw in town making affordable parking in the CBD even harder to find, bringing with it another fine that will have little to no impact on people with more disposable income.

Parking on grass berms is now a no-no between Marsh St and Eleventh Ave, a pretty large swath of land encompassing the broader CBD.

Nine $40 fines and 74 warnings were issued to people parking on berms in the six days after the new bylaw came into effect.

Now, who exactly are the people parking on grass berms throughout the CBD? I’ll bet you $40 that a majority of those people are average CBD workers driving their average cars from their average homes to their average jobs.

I’m by no means an expert, but by using my excellent deductive skills I can calculate that most employers in the CBD don’t supply a carpark for each staff member. Who has that kind of space? We’d be a concrete desert if that were the case.

And, as a broad generalisation, when you’ve got more employees than carparks, it’s going to be the higher-ups that get the coveted spots as one of their perks.

Back in my days of being an average CBD worker, I too was a berm parker. There were a few street parks near the office if you got there early enough, but otherwise, you’d find a patch of grass under a pōhutukawa and hope the bird poop didn’t stain your paint too badly.

In winter, I’d worry that I’d get stuck in some of the frighteningly churned-up mud pits, but would continue parking there regardless because it was still the best choice (late shifts don’t mix well with bus timetables).

Yes, Tauranga City Council commissioner Bill Walsey was right to say that Tauranga sometimes looked like “an utter shambles” because of berm parking. The tracks my 1994 Toyota left behind could attest to that.

And yeah, maybe it was the right time to do something about it. But I think it is unfair that the financial burden falls on the less well-shod.

The council can only do so much, I understand that. Fines are one of the few tools it has at its disposal.

But I reckon that we as a country should implement fines Scandinavian style: base them on disposable income.

There was a famous case covered by international media in 2015 of a Finnish man who was caught speeding at over 100km/h in an 80km/h zone and, when Finnish police calculated his financial position, the man’s fine totalled 54,000 Euros.

I bet that stung.

Now, that’s a fine worth a little more than paying for an Auckland carpark.

Sonya Bateson is a writer, reader, and crafter raising her family in Tauranga. She is a millennial who enjoys eating avocado on toast, drinking lattes and defying stereotypes. As a sceptic, she reserves the right to change her mind when presented with new evidence.