Helsinki wants to hike up its parking fines

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A passenger who sneaks into a tram without a valid ticket will, if caught, be liable to a penalty fare of EUR 80.
      In turn, a Helsinki motorist who fails to pay his parking fee or parks illegally usually only gets slapped with a fine of EUR 40 placed under his or her windscreen wiper blade.
     
The City of Helsinki is of the opinion that the sums are not equitable.
      They should be more or less the same. The aim of the Helsinki Public Works Committee is to rectify the situation and bring the parking fine to the same level with the public transportation penalty fare.
      The Public Works Department, in turn, regards the present parking fine as so small that it does not significantly prevent people from parking incorrectly.
      The City, however, is unable to raise the parking fine, as in Helsinki it is already as high as the law permits.
      The fine has remained the same for the past three years: EUR 50 in the most expensive parking zone in the centre of the city, and EUR 40 elsewhere.
     
Now a working committee within the Ministry of Justice has begun working on the modernisation of the legislation regarding parking surveillance. One of the issues under deliberation is the size of a parking fine.
      From the legislative point of view the raising of the fine to the level of the public transportation penalty fare is not that simple.
      “The public transportation penalty fare is a lousy point of comparison. It is a fraud-type of crime, which already from the onset is a more serious crime than failing to pay your parking fee”, says Jaakko Rautio, who acts as the chairman of the committee considering the amendment.
      “Travelling without a ticket causes the transportation contractor to lose money, whereas for example parking on the sidewalk merely results in the pedestrians having to take a couple of extra steps while walking around the vehicle. But it does not necessarily bring financial harm to anyone.”
      The charged payment, which in layman’s terms is called a parking fine, is in fact an administrative fee. In Rautio’s view, one must keep in mind how this fee compares with fines that are imposed for actual crimes.
     
In Helsinki, more people are caught for wrongful parking than for bumming a ride on trams or buses without a valid ticket.
      This, despite the fact that Helsinki City Transport (HKL) employs 73 ticket inspectors against the city’s 64 parking attendants.
      The parking attendants collected EUR ten million in fines last year, whereas the HKL inspectors drummed up a mere EUR 2.8 million from the ticketless travellers.
     
Year after year, more and more fines have been issued in both groups.
      This is because both ticket inspecting and parking monitoring have been intensified.


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Helsinki´s underground parking structures will soon accommodate three times as many cars as street parking (15.9.2008)
  Helsinki City Transport plans major increase in its complement of ticket inspectors (12.9.2006)

See also:
  Helsinki diplomats pay only a fraction of their parking fines (14.1.2009)

Helsingin Sanomat