Anyone who’s picked up a parking ticket will have cursed their luck.
But it turns out it has less to do with whether Venus is in ascendance, or which side of the bed the traffic warden got out of, and more to do with the exact street you chose to park on.
Working alongside 10 Group, we helped assemble a national dataset for Confused.com using Freedom of Information requests sent to councils across the UK.
The question was straightforward: which single street in each area generated the most penalty charge notices over the past year?
What came back was anything but evenly spread.
In Birmingham, one stretch of Corporation Street accounted for 62,725 tickets in a year. In Stockport, a single road was responsible for 57 per cent of all fines issued by the council. Across just ten streets, drivers racked up more than £42 million in penalties.
At that point it stops being a general story about parking enforcement and becomes something much more specific. Certain roads, often with very particular setups, generating outsized volumes. In Birmingham, many fines were linked to drivers entering the Clean Air Zone without realising. In Stockport, a bus gate accounted for the majority of tickets issued by the council.
Pulling it together meant chasing responses from hundreds of councils, dealing with different formats, partial returns and the usual FoI friction, then lining it all up so the comparisons hold.
The result ran as a national in the Mail. You can read the full report here.
It’s a good example of what you can get out of a coordinated FoI campaign when the question is tight and the dataset is built properly.
If you’re looking for a solid dataset, pulled together properly and turned into a story that will catch the eye of national editors, get in touch.
