Car parking

Here’s another letter that was written to the forum page at The Straits Times just a couple days ago. Sections of the letter are below (edited to save space, but full letter in the link).

May 14, 2008

Insert graciousness into URA’s grace period

RECENTLY, I was taught the realities of official graciousness by the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA). On April 23, in response to a request by Singapore General Hospital (SGH) for blood platelets, I went to the hospital about 11am. To my chagrin, my usual EPS (ERP Payment System) Carpark H was undergoing some work, and the other carparks were full. After circling for a while, I was lucky to get a lot in Carpark B, a coupon carpark farthest from my destination.

…

I did get a parking ticket, and wrote in to appeal. My friends and I were confident the URA would let me off. A $10 fine is not a large sum, but I hoped for some graciousness. Last Thursday, the URA wrote to tell me I had exceeded the ‘grace period’ and had to pay up within the next seven days.

What is a ‘grace period’, I ask, for a person tied up in tubes, or for a dialysis patient hooked to a malfunctioning machine? Is the ‘grace period’ different in different circumstances? What is the grace period for someone who parked his car, dove into traffic to save a child, and slipped into a coma for a week? Are the grace periods all the same?

I have paid my fine, to avoid this being seen as just of self-interest, but would like to hear the URA’s point of view, or what graciousness it can show.

Tan Tatt Si

This letter brought to mind a similar incident I experienced in Perth some 4 years ago while at Curtin. When Ling came by to visit in September that year, on one morning we drove to the Perth zoo for a visit. It was raining heavily that morning, and when we drove into the carpark, saw that the ticketing machine only accepted coins (I had only Aussie notes).

We got off the car in the rain, then walked to the Zoo ticketing booth counters to exchange notes to coins. As it was raining quite heavily and we had just one umbrella, it took us maybe around 10 minutes to walk to and fro. When we got back though, we saw that we’d just been given a summons by a parking warden for not displaying a suitable parking slip.

When reasoning with the parking warden didn’t work (and in fact he seemed rather irritated), we drove to the county office some distance away after the zoo trip. Filled in some forms, and I wrote a supporting account explaining that we weren’t intending to default on the parking slip, but we really didn’t have coins and had gone to the ticketing booth to exchange appropriate currency.

Very nicely, I got a reply several weeks later noting that the summons had been waived. That saved me a nice AUD70. It may not be a big sum if you’re working, but when you’re a poor student, AUD70 isn’t chickenfeed. Oh yeah, the picture here was taken at about the same time. I was whizzing around in a 10 year old Proton Wira.

This account is by no means a general representation of vehicle incidents during my stay in Perth, because while on a family vacation along Margaret River a year before this, we had a really unpleasant experience with a car wash, a story my elder brother I’m certain will remember all too well. But that’s for another blog entry to relate.:)