Open letter to NTNU parking administration / Rectors office
Recently I received a parking fine after failing to pay the charge at an NTNU staff/student carpark, this 600Kr fine now means that my total fines since this new scheme began are 2,400Kr.
... perhaps the most expensive piece of yellow paper in the world.
Sølvi W. Normannsen
This value represents 100 days of parking at the maximum charge of 24Kr / day. For myself, this large amount is equivalent to over a whole years’ worth of parking, since I do not always use the car and usually cycle the 8km distance I travel to work (weather, health, bicycle condition and circumstances permitting).
All four of my parking tickets were received because I simply forgot to pay a fee that I never used to have to pay at all, and indeed it is not something that I am obliged to do every day. There was no malicious intent on my part to avoid paying, I simply forgot. After speaking with colleagues regarding this issue, I find that I am not alone.
During my way to work, I am nearly always thinking about my day ahead. The nature of the great work and research NTNU staff and students engage in requires and naturally stimulates our minds to think about important matters other than paying parking tickets through a somewhat poorly advertised system (by this, I am referring to the tiny black and white signs that have appeared offering reminders of the parking regulations that are not prominent at all and blend perfectly into the grey background of urban Trondheim.).
It is my firm belief that NTNU should be encouraging, as much as possible, the employment, well-being and support of learned academics and essential support staff, and of course reducing as much as possible the financial burden on our student community rather than supporting the employment of parking officials and city council administrators. To this end, I would really like the system to be scrapped altogether, however if charges must be made for parking, I suggest improvements to the widely unpopular (at least from personal conversations) new parking scheme with the specific aims of reducing the number of hours required to police the system and avoiding unnecessary parking fines for the hard working community of NTNU, who have already been financially penalised as a result of this rather unfair and unnecessary system.
My suggestions are as follows:
1). There should be a daily rate that is equivalent or less than the current maximum charge of 24Kr / day to park at NTNU. This could be introduced alongside the current system.
2) This charge is to be paid upon a traffic warden inputting the vehicle registration into a database (as they do now), which charges a pre-paid account registered to the vehicle. Better still, a barcode or Quick Response Code displayed on the vehicles windscreen would allow rapid scanning of the vehicles, speedup the process and require less working hours to police.
3) The daily charge would only be charged once per day, however many times the vehicle was scanned.
4) Vehicles with a valid parking ticket purchased through the current system would not be charged the daily fee. However, in the event that their ticket has expired they would be eligible for a fine, since this would discourage carpark users from only paying for a short ticket and then intentionally staying longer and taking the risk that they would only be charged the daily rate if their vehicle was checked.
5) Fines would only be issued when there are insufficient funds in the pre-paid account to cover the daily charge, in the event of a short ticket expiring and not being renewed or if the vehicle was not registered to use the NTNU parking facility.
This, I believe, would offer a balanced and fair parking experience to all at NTNU and avoid the frustration and undue financial loss at receiving perhaps the most expensive piece of yellow paper in the world. In addition, such a scheme would continue to support the financing of NTNU and contribute to its commitments to investing in environmentally friendly transport solutions.
These proposals would still discourage car use, since it is a pay-per-use principle rather than a long term charge (indeed it could replace the current options to pay monthly or six monthly), and encourage alternative means of transport or adoption of an electric car. I hope you can empathise with my frustration at the current system and will consider my proposal. Indeed I am sure that Norway's leading technical university is more than capable of designing and implementing a better system to collect and monitor parking fees.
I look forward to hearing from you in due course.
Yours sincerely,
Dr David Bassett.
