There’s nothing that ruins your day quicker than the sickening feeling you get finding that sinister yellow envelope tacked onto your windscreen, particularly when you feel you’ve done nothing wrong.
Statistics from the RAC Foundation claim that the number of parking tickets being issued in the UK is steadily on the rise, with a parking fine issued every seven seconds on average and it’s estimated to cost British motorists a total of £275 million per year.
But even though getting a ticket is something we’d all rather avoid, if you are on the receiving end at least you can find some solace in the fact that it could always be worse, as these examples attest.
Below, we list some of the heaviest parking fines ever issued in the UK and the reasons why they happened.
£18,500 for parking outside your own garage
Believe it or not, but back in 2015 Carly Mackie from Dundee was issued an astronomical fine of £18,500 for parking in front of her own garage. Although the garages had double yellow lines in front of them, Carly said she was parking on a cobbled area between the garage and the road with no lines.
As a result, she ignored the parking tickets and believed they were unenforceable until a court ruling forced her to pay up. Court costs included, the total amount she had to pay ended up at an eye-watering £24,500.
£781 for doing absolutely nothing
Although £781 pales in comparison to £18,500, you’d be pretty wicked off if you were forced to pay it for no good reason at all. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened to Surrey resident Denise Legeay Humberstone.
Earlier this year, she paid for parking at her local shopping centre car park, only to later discover that nearly £800 had been taken from her bank account. As it turns out, it was a result of a technical problem in the car park, which caused several drivers to be falsely overcharged for parking.
The total amount Denise was charged works out at roughly £80 per minute, though luckily Surrey Heath Borough Council says she'll get a full refund.
£14,000 for abandoning a car
We’ve previously covered the mystery of abandoned cars, but the story of an unknown driver who abandoned their black Mercedes-Benz S-Class in a car park in Birmingham really takes the biscuit.
The Merc sat in the car park for an astounding three years, being charged a £13 fine each day until it accumulated a total of more than £14,000 in outstanding parking fines.
Whether or not it’s still there is unclear, but for the sake of the owner’s bank account let’s hope it’s not!
£14,000 for parking in disabled bays
We’re not the sort to wish misfortune on anyone, but in this case there’s probably an argument that the driver deserved it…
Mondeo owner David Lee racked up a total of £14,000 in parking fines after ignoring 140 separate tickets in a single year alone, which he’d racked up by wrongly leaving his car parked in disabled bays.
Along with the fines he also accumulated a fair number of nasty messages tacked onto his windscreen, but it didn’t seem to bother him until he realised the tickets were, in fact, enforceable.
£70 for stopping to check a signpost
Again, while this isn’t the biggest fine ever issued, it’s still a staggering amount considering that David Osborne’s only offence was to pull over on a Bristol street just to check the sign that listed parking restrictions.
Despite the fact that he was parked up for no longer than 90 seconds, in a bitter twist of irony he was slapped with a fine to the tune of £70. All’s well that ends well though, as the council later reconsidered.
