Bugs are multiplying in this large city where many motorists receive fines by mistake.
Technology isn’t always a good thing. Just ask the drivers in this major French city who have been receiving completely unjustified fines in their mailboxes for the past two years. In August 2022, the city of Toulouse was proud to announce the launch of a new car parking enforcement system that has already been implemented in other cities, such as Paris, Marseille and Bordeaux. With a population of nearly 500,000 and more than 16,000 paid parking spaces, Toulouse wanted to effectively combat fraud that was “costing” it tens of thousands of euros each year.
The Pink City, as well known for its Place du Capitole, its rugby team as for its cassoulet, has thus acquired five cars equipped with cameras to read license plates. These vehicles called Lapi (Automated License Plate Reading) are intended to relieve municipal agents. Unmarked, they crisscross the streets for several hours a day to track down bad payers. All scanned plates are compared to those recorded in the parking meter. When a failure to pay is reported, a fine is sent to the offending motorist.
The problem, and it is a big one, is that for two years the errors have been piling up. According to our colleagues at France Info, 6% of fines are contested, almost one in fifteen. Most of the time rightly, the city hall acknowledging several electronic bugs because the robot vehicles do not take “into account certain spaces and the division of the zones is complex”… Anger is rising among the motorists who have been wrongly fined. Some of them even receive two fines for the same day when they are perfectly in order with their annual subscription. Which also costs them time and energy to contest each fine.
No one escapes it. Especially not shopkeepers. This is particularly the case for driving schools that are forced to park their cars on the street. Quoted by our colleagues, the director of a driving school in downtown Toulouse castigates this new system. “These automated tickets represent a budget of 3 to 4,000 euros per year. We have to park the car for 5 minutes to give feedback to the student at the end of each hour. And we get fined even though we pay a professional subscription and someone stays in the car.”
Since the implementation of the Lapi car system in Toulouse, the number of fines issued in one year for failure to pay for parking has almost increased tenfold to 360,000 (in 2023)! It is just a shame that fraudsters are not the only ones receiving fines…