Parking Defence Fails

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31781, 11 September 1968, Page 18

Parking Defence Fails

(N.Z. Press Association) DUNEDIN, Sept. 10. A contention by a Dunedin motorist that when he parked his car outside another car occupying a metered space he was not in fact double parking because the space controlled bv the meter was not available to him, has been rejected by Mr T. A. Ross, S.M., in a reserved decision today. Andrew Joseph Francis Brown, a promoter, was convicted and fined $5, with costs of $5, on a charge of double parking in Stuart Street, brought by the Dunedin City traffic department. He claimed at the original hearing that when he parked his car he was as near as was practicable to the left side of the available road—which was the outer limit of the metered space.

But the Magistrate held that the definition in the regulations of a roadway, as it applied to a city street, meant the whole of the surface, from kerb to kerb. “If the defendant is to succeed he must show that the creation of metered parking spaces alters this position. The argument that traffic is precluded, for the time of the occupation of the spaces, from using this road surface has some attraction, for it is clear that at this time all the rest of the traffic in the street is prevented from

using them,” the Magistrate said.

However, it was necessary to decide what was meant by “vehicular traffic in general.” If the cars parked in the meter spaces were within the meaning of this phrase, then the road they occupied was part of the “roadway" as defined, he said. In the view of the Magistrate the vehicles in the metered spaces fell within the definition of "general vehicular traffic.”

“There is nothing which distinguishes one of these vehicles except that it was

first to occupy the particular space and its driver put a coin in the meter. The driver has no continuing right to occupy the space and moreover the spaces can be occupied free of charge for up to five minutes. In this case the parked cars were part of vehicular traffic in general using the road surface, the relevant edge of which, as defined, was the left-hand kerb. The defendant stopped or parked his car with a parked car / between it and the kerb, and so must be convicted,” the Magistrate said.