Councillors push for changes in the way parking-enforcement is done in the city

As the council gears up to write new guidelines for the private company that will clamp and fine drivers who park illegally in the city in the coming years, councillors and council managers met to discuss what they should look like.

After the meeting, which was not open to the public or the press, councillors who attended said they hope the next parking-enforcement contract the council awards will push the company that gets it to do things a bit differently.

Like focus less on clamping illegally parked cars – Dublin City Council is the only local authority in the country that does this, the National Transport Authority says – and more on issuing fines to the drivers who parked them. And focus not only on the city centre, but also on enforcement in areas a bit further out.

One of the more contentious issues they discussed was how the council’s contractor should deal with people who park on footpaths. Work to stamp it out entirely? Or formally write it into the rules to allow it in certain areas?

Green Party Councillor Janet Horner said she’d like to see footpath parking eliminated, while Labour Councillor Dermot Lacey said there are some streets where it’s the only option and that should formally be acknowledged and allowed.

Dublin City Council has not replied to queries sent 25 March asking what the outcome of the meeting was, and whether the council managers would change how they write the next parking-enforcement contract, based on councillors’ asks.

Independent Councillor Cieran Perry said last Thursday that council managers at the meeting said they would take on board what councillors said, while writing the next parking enforcement contract. “But, ultimately, it’s their call,” he said.

The context

At the moment, the company DSPS has a contract with Dublin City Council to do parking enforcement – clamping and fining people for illegal parking.

But that contract is due to end in July, so over the last year there has been some discussion about what should happen after that.

“Time is kind of of the essence here,” said Feljin Jose, who’s running for a seat on the council for the Green Party in Cabra-Glasnevin, last August.

“I think if Dublin City Council wants to change the contract or put out a new contract or take it back, they have to act now,” he said.

Last September, at a meeting of the council’s transport committee, Horner and other Green Party councillors proposed a motion that – among other things – the council should take over parking enforcement instead of contracting it out again to a private company.

Council transport head Brendan O’Brien said no way, basically, but suggested that council managers get together with councillors to talk about how the next contract for a company to provide a parking service could be different, better.

That finally happened on 20 March. The meeting began with a presentation by DSPS, the company that now provides parking-enforcement services in the city under contract to the council.

It showed that DSPS had clamped 40,732 vehicles in 2022 and 44,128 in 2023. The number of fines it issued rose from 10,740 in 2022 to 18,415 in 2023.

Most of the top 10 streets for vehicle clamping in 2023 were in one part of the city: Ranelagh, Clarendon Street, Mespil Road, Merrion Square, Merrion Square West, Waterloo Road, Chelmsford Road. As they had been in 2022.

Although DSPS’s contract is up in July, the councillors said, council managers plan to extend it for one year while they put out a tender and award a new contract to the winner who would start work under the new contract in 2025.

Once DSPS left the 20 March meeting, council managers and councillors discussed what objectives should be included in the next contract for parking enforcement in the city.

More spread out, more transparent

Social Democrats Councillor Catherine Stocker, who represents the Clontarf local electoral area, said she’d like the next contract to mandate more enforcement outside of the city centre.

“Outside the city centre, there’s a sense of lawlessness when it comes to parking,” Stocker said after the meeting.

“People park on the footpath with all four wheels up, they park on double yellow lines, they park everywhere and anywhere,” she said. “It is not enforced, nobody believes it’s going to be enforced.”

If someone reports illegal parking to DSPS, “They come out once, they clamp everything on the ground and then they never appear again,” she said. “So I think there needs to be some degree of consistency and repetition for people to get the message.”

Perry, the independent councillor, who represents Cabra-Glasnevin, said similar last Thursday.

“Their focus on the city centre is a bit of an issue for those of us who don’t represent the city centre,” Perry said. “At the moment most people would know there’s no chance of them getting caught.”

Stocker said she’d also like more transparency and accountability built into the next parking-enforcement contract.

The best way to do that would be for the council to hire community wardens who would tackle illegal parking, littering, and dog fouling, she said. But council managers have made clear that’s not an option on the table, Stocker said.

“Management staff in the council are never big fans of in-housing anything. Councillors by and large would like to take back control of many things,” she said.

If in-house enforcement isn’t going to happen, Stocker said, she’d like the next parking enforcement contract to require the company that wins it to appear regularly before each local area committee, so councillors from each part of the city can question them.

“So twice a year for instance they come to area committee and they say this is the number of enforcements we’ve had in your area these are the most common roads in your area,” Stocker said.

“Rather than just being a list which is essentially you know we do parking enforcement in south inner Dublin, kind of Pembroke ward,” she said.

Less clamping, more fines

The National Transport Authority said in January that Dublin City Council is the only local authority in the country still clamping.

Researchers based in Canada and England who study parking say wheel-clamping is not a great method of enforcement.

Fine Gael Councillor James Geoghegan, who represents the Pembroke local electoral area, in January called for the council to give up on clamping – and he’s not the first councillor to do so.

So at the 20 March meeting, Horner, the Green Party councillor, says she asked council managers at the meeting why Dublin City Council continues to use clamping as a method of parking-enforcement.

They said it’s a visible deterrent, Horner said, a reminder to drivers of what can happen to them if they park illegally.

Lacey, the Labour councillor, said by phone last week that he thought clamping was effective as a deterrent. “As someone who used to work in town and needed my car for work I was very conscious of not getting clamped,” he said.

Perry, the independent councillor, said “clamps are very visible and they frighten people”.

The next contract will very likely still ask the company to use clamping as a method of parking enforcement, they all said.

But in recent years parking enforcement in the city has been moving towards the use of more fines – and the numbers DSPS presented to the meeting showed the number of fines it issued nearly doubling between 2022 and 2023.

The council in 2021 launched a 12-month pilot of using fines to try to clear footpaths, bus lanes and cycle paths. In 2022, they said they wanted to ramp-up the programme, as it was working well.

Now, fines have apparently moved from pilot to policy, says Horner, the Green Party councillor. They’re becoming a more and more important part of parking-enforcement in the city, she said.

Horner said she expects this trend to continue in the next contract. “I think they generally are like, ‘Yeah, we need to keep moving in that direction. I think there will be changes.’”

Compliance with clamping vs fines

Clamping and issuing fines both have their pros and cons, said Horner, who represents the north inner-city.

DSPS’s numbers showed that in about 92 percent of cases drivers paid the €125 fee to get their clamp removed. So that’s a pretty good compliance rate, she said.

But in about 8 percent of cases, the clamps were illegally removed, meaning 3,574 were “lost” in 2023, according to the DSPS presentation. And only three of those cases have been pursued through the courts, Horner said.

“If you remove your clamp illegally in 99.9% of cases you’re going to get away with it,” she said. Because without a witness willing to testify to who removed it, the driver can simply say they’ve no idea, someone else did, she said.

Lacey, the Labour councillor, said he’d like to see “a stronger response” to people who cut clamps off their wheels.

For fines, the payment rate is much lower than for clamps, said Horner, the Green Party councillor, more like 70 percent or 80 percent. But people who fail to pay those are easier to pursue through the courts, she said.

“However, to pursue those, the council will need more resources,” Horner said. “This is a question now – to what extent you can and will pursue unpaid fines? We do need to be pursuing a credible number.”

Footpath parking

One of the more contentious issues discussed at the 20 March meeting was footpath parking, councillors who attended said.

In March 2023, Horner proposed a motion, which her fellow councillors backed, that the council should come up with a strategy to eliminate footpath parking.

“It is widespread throughout the city and represents a significant obstacle and threat to the safety of all who use the streets but most especially people with disabilities and those using buggies or prams,” the motion said.

Last week, she said she wants eliminating footpath parking to be one of the objectives the council sets for the next parking-enforcement company, in its contract.

So she said she hopes there’ll be a shift in the next contract towards more enforcement against all kinds of nuisance parking – on footpaths, in cycle lanes, in bus lanes – as opposed to people in paid parking spots who haven’t paid and displayed, or who have overstayed.

The last time the council put out a tender for parking-enforcement services, it said the winning contractor would have to ensure the number of vehicles clamped for “pay and display offences does not exceed 55% of the total number”.

Meanwhile, Lacey, the Labour councillor, and Perry, the independent councillor said eliminating footpath parking altogether is just not practical. On a few streets in the areas they represent, there is no way to park cars legally without blocking traffic, they said.

“In general we don’t want people parking on the footpath in the city – but in some areas there’s no other way of doing business,” Lacey said. “I can think of three roads in my area.”

He suggested that, perhaps, after consultation with local residents, those specific streets should be formally recognised and the residents allowed to park on the footpaths. “I think people with buggies and wheelchairs and all that we’d be able to work that out,” he said.

Perry said he thought having a formal list of those specific streets was a good idea.

“It’s still not good enough if that means cars blocking the entire footpath, leaving no room for people in wheelchairs or with prams to get by,” he said. But there are some streets where cars could park with two wheels up on the footpath, leaving room still for people to walk by on the path, he said.

For other streets, maybe making them one-way would create enough space for all road users, or putting in parking for residents nearby somewhere, he said.

“Ultimately the solution is fewer people driving cars,” he said.

National and local government policy is pushing people to stop driving so much, give up cars, and switch to public transport or walking or cycling, Perry said.

But that could take a while until the public transport system is a viable alternative for a lot of people, and before people find they are actually willing to make a change.

“We’re all in agreement we should drive less and we need to deal with climate change, but few of us are willing to actually give up our own cars,” he said.