Alum Rock Road is the top Birmingham street for parking tickets issued
Jul 27 2009 by James Cartledge, Birmingham Mail
IT’S Birmingham’s very own street of shame – the road where motorists are driven to distraction by the number of parking tickets being handed out.
Alum Rock Road, in Washwood Heath, saw almost 4,000 tickets handed out in the last year alone, making its two-mile stretch the most ticketed street in the city.
And it emerged Birmingham City Council was currently handing out about 200 tickets a day more on average than at the same time last year.
The figures were revealed in a journalism project which unearthed the date, time and location of every one of the 135,656 parking tickets handed out by officials working for the council in the year to April 2009.
Alum Rock Road was followed by Stratford Road, Sparkhill, and Corporation Street in the city centre.
A Birmingham City Council spokeswoman said: “Large sections of Alum Rock Road were unenforceable from late 2007 until early in 2009 due to poorly maintained lines and signs, missing road markings and incorrect traffic regulation orders.
“Therefore, only a small section of Alum Rock Road and Washwood Heath Road was patrolled by civil enforcement officers. In February 2009 all the lines were refreshed and necessary remedial work carried out.
Information: Click on each cloud to see the street and number of tickets or click here to see this in a larger map |
“A new traffic scheme was introduced on the first section of Alum Rock Road which resulted in parking restrictions on this section of road being enforced.”
The spokeswoman said there were a number of reasons for the rise in tickets, including the retraining of parking staff.
The figures were obtained through a Freedom of Information request by the Help Me Investigate team, a project set up by a group of Birmingham-based academics, journalists and programmers.
To see the data for all the parking tickets handed out in Birmingham as a spreadsheet, log on to http://bit.ly/fPpcr
