If you report a car parked illegally in the city, it’s unlikely to result in any enforcement action, records show

On Monday about 1.45pm a pair of cars were parked on the side of Kimmage Road Lower, each with two wheels up on the footpath.

If someone had reported these cars to Dublin Street Parking Services (DSPS), which does parking enforcement for the council, the most likely result would have been no enforcement: no warning, no fine, no clamp, no towing.

And not because they aren’t breaking the law, but because the most likely result is that DSPS would never have responded to the report – or only responded after the cars left.

That’s according to data released by Dublin City Council in response to a request under the Freedom of Information Act.

A spreadsheet with 16,383 records from between July 2021 up to the end of 2023, says where the obstruction reportedly was, and what DSPS’s response was.

DSPS’s response to about 42 percent of these complaints was that they didn’t have staff available to respond to them. Either “Crew enforcing elsewhere” or “No crew available”.

And its response to another 28 percent or so was that by the time a crew got there, the vehicle was gone. “All clear when checked.”

So in about 70 percent of cases, when someone complained about a vehicle obstructing something, DSPS didn’t go there at all – or didn’t get there in time to even see the vehicle, much less decide whether enforcement was appropriate.

“That’s terrible,” says Green Party Councillor Feljin Jose, who has been pushing for council managers to write a new approach to parking enforcement into their next tender – due out soon-ish – for a company to provide the service in the city.

DSPS referred queries about its record of responding to complaints of vehicles obstructing roads, footpaths and cycleways to Dublin City Council. The council has not responded to queries about this sent last Thursday.

A push for change

In August 2019, Dublin City Council awarded a contract to DSPS to do parking enforcement in the city.

That contract was due to end in July, so over the last year there has been discussion among councillors and council managers about what should happen after that.

It’s the job of council managers to write the tender for the contract, but councillors have been trying to weigh in too – calling for a rethink from first principles, really.

Last September, at a meeting of the council’s transport committee, Janet 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.

But council transport head Brendan O’Brien said no way, basically. “I genuinely don’t think there’s any possibility” of that, he said.

In January, Fine Gael Councillor James Geoghegan, now lord mayor, became the latest councillor to propose (in a motion) considering doing away with clamping.

Researchers based in Canada and England who study parking say wheel-clamping is not a great method of enforcement. Fines are more common and effective, they say.

In Ireland, a spokesperson for the National Transport Authority (NTA) said at the time that “My understanding is Dublin City Council is [the] only one currently using clamping as a method of parking enforcement.”

In March, there was a workshop involving council managers and councillors to talk about what the council’s next parking-enforcement tender should look like.

They talked about getting more enforcement in areas outside the city centre, getting DSPS in to talk to councillors regularly, clamping versus fines, and what to do about footpath parking.

Although DSPS’s contract was up in July, the councillors said after that meeting that council managers planned to extend it for a 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.

Time for more enforcement?

The council should have a way to measure the level of illegal parking in the city, and in the next contract it should set targets for the company that wins it to lower that level, says Jose, the Green Party councillor.

“There’s no good measurement now of levels of illegal parking,” he says.

At the moment, the council sets goals for its parking-enforcement programme, but they are not designed to measure the level of illegal parking in the city.

In council chief executive Richard Shakespeare’s July management report there’s a section tracking a wide variety of “service objectives” based on performance measures, and showing results for Q1 2024.

In that section, there’s a service objective to “improve parking enforcement with a focus on keeping cycle tracks and bus lanes free of illegally parked cars”.

And the performance measures for that are “% of vehicles declamped within 1 hour of payment (Target: 85%)”, “% of vehicles declamped within 2 hours of payment (Target: 100%)”, “% first stage appeals finalised within 21 days”, and “% of first stage appeals refunded because time has elapsed”.

By these measures, the council’s performance on parking enforcement is excellent. But none of them show what the level of illegal parking is in the city, and whether it’s going up or down.

In addition to setting goals for reducing the level of illegal parking in the city – not just for being quick to declamp vehicles after the drivers pay for that – the next contract should be bigger, Jose says.

It should pay for more staff, so they will be able to do more enforcement – including responding to a larger share of reports about vehicles obstructing roads, footpaths, cycleways and access to businesses, he says.

At the moment, the response is just not good enough, he says.

DSPS’s responses to reports

In the spreadsheet released by Dublin City Council on DSPS’s responses to reports of vehicle obstructions from mid-2021 to the end of last year, the most common complaint was of a vehicle obstructing a footpath.

Of the 16,383 alleged violations listed, 22 percent were “Parking a vehicle in a footway”.

Another 15 percent were “Obstructing premises access/egress”, 12 percent were about parking on a double yellow line, 12 percent were about not paying for parking, 9 percent were about obstructing traffic, and 4 percent were about parking too close to a junction. All other reported violations accounted for 3 percent or less of reports.

In terms of responses, in 70 percent of the 16,383 listed cases, DSPS didn’t have someone to send, or when their person arrived the vehicle was gone already.

Add to that the 11 percent that it looks like didn’t warrant enforcement, or that DSPS was unable to take action on.

Those are the ones marked as “Parked Legally”, “Vehicle Authorised”, “Cancelled by Requester”, “No contact details”, “Duplicate Request”, “Private Property”, “Problem with lines & Signs”, “Vehicle Paid on Parking Tag”, “Valid Residents Permit”, “Meter out of order”, “No access to location”, or left blank.

That leaves 19 percent of cases where it looks like DSPS got staff to the location while the vehicle was still there causing an obstruction. Of those, 8 percent are listed as “Driver returned” and 0.5 percent as “Grace time given”.

In the end, DSPS issued a warning, or a fine, or clamped a vehicle, or towed it, in about 9 percent of cases.

A deeper issue

That level of enforcement in response to reported violations “is really bad”, says Jason Cullen, spokesperson for the Dublin Commuter Coalition.

But just paying more for DSPS or whoever wins the next contract to do more enforcement isn’t necessarily going to solve the problem, he says.

The low level of enforcement “speaks more to a fault in how we approach things than a lack of staff”, Cullen says.

“How we design our infrastructure, in many cases makes it easy for drivers to park illegally,” he says. “It’s also become somewhat socially acceptable to park illegally while running into the shops, which only serves to push the boundaries of illegal parking.”

“That leads more people to choose to park on footpaths or in loading bays which makes it impossible to enforce fully, because you’ll never be able to get the staff numbers to tackle it,” he said.

Jose, the Green Party councillor, says that although he’d like to see more enforcement built into the council’s next parking-enforcement contract, significantly reducing illegal parking in the city is going to take a bigger change than that in the long-term.

As proposed by his party colleagues in September, Jose says he wants to see the council hire wardens to walk beats around the city and be present in communities, to prevent things like illegal dumping, dog fouling, and illegal parking.

“If we had wardens, we’d have a much better public realm in a lot of ways,” Jose said.