Teaching assistant is shocked to get £50 ticket after leaving her car TWO INCHES over parking bay line as she took family for lunch
- Rebecca Edge from Teignmouth, Devon, was fined in a car park in Cockington
- The teaching assistant was out with her three-year-old twins when she was fined
- She has appealed the fine and says she was ticketed minutes after parking
A mother was shocked to get a ‘petty’ £50 ticket minutes after parking her car because one of the wheels was just two inches over a line.
Rebecca Edge, a higher learning teaching assistant from Teignmouth, was out with her three-year-old twins Teddy and Peggy in Cockington, south Devon.
She squeezed her 4×4 into a tightly packed car park on Cockington Lane near the Rose Cottage Tea Room and did not realise why she had been ticketed at first.
After taking pictures of the car she noticed the front wheel was a couple of inches over the parking bay line and she says other cars had been similarly fined.
Rebecca Edge, a teaching assistant from Teignmouth, was shocked to be fined £50 for parking with her wheel just two inches beyond the line while out out with her three-year-old twins Teddy and Peggy in Cockington, South Devon
Rebecca (pictured with her family) says she has already contested the ‘petty’ and ‘ridiculous’ ticket
She said: ‘At first I couldn’t work why we had the ticket. It was only after taking photos we realised what it was for. It’s ridiculous.
‘It is a very tight car park anyway with lots of other cars and when you have kids in big child seats, it’s not easy getting them in and out in a cramped space.
‘We saw other larger cars getting ticketed as well so it wasn’t just us.
‘If one of our wheels was entirely over the line then I could understand it, but this was just a couple of inches. It is really, really petty.
‘It was written for us minutes after we parked, so I can’t help but think they were watching us at the time.’
She was planning to go for lunch with her children at the nearby pub but the ticket forced her to rethink her plans
Rebecca says she has already contested the ticket. She was planning to go for lunch with her children at the nearby pub but the ticket forced her to rethink her plans.
‘We were going to do our bit and support the local economy by eating in the pub afterwards, but we didn’t after getting a £50 parking ticket,’ she said.
‘That means the local economy has missed out on that little bit of extra support.
‘I have appealed it and I might even take it to court if they reject it as I feel very strongly about it.’
Torbay Council have been approached for comment.
8.4million parking tickets were handed out by private parking firms over the last year, an increase of 1.6million
It comes after it was revealed private parking firms handed out 1.6million more tickets in the last year compared with the previous 12 months.
The number has rocketed to 8.4million, meaning they were being issued at the astonishing rate of one every four seconds.
This figure for the financial year 2019-20 was 24 per cent up on the 6.8million tickets issued in 2018-19, according to research by the RAC Foundation.
The tickets can cost drivers up to £100 a time.