residents victims of serial fines because of the Lapi system
They received a dozen fines while they have a resident parking pass. This is the misadventure that happened to a few Toulouse residents at the end of September and the beginning of October. A big bug related to the implementation of the Lapi system (automatic reading of license plates).
Since August 16, a car, then two, equipped with cameras, have been circulating in the streets of the pink city**.** And the first verbalization figures are impressive. 35.322 FPS (post-parking packages, the system that replaces fines) on more than 90,000 vehicles checked in one month. And again, these figures are only for the month of September, when only one car was in operation.
Twice as many verbalizations
And if we compare to past years, for one month, we were more on the basis of 17,500 FPS (210,000 in 2019 for one year). The number of verbalizations was therefore multiplied by two while the system was not yet optimized. To get an idea, with the two cars, each parking space is checked once a day. Before, with the agents, it was once every three days.
Around 3,000 appeals in October?
And who says more fines says more appeals. The town hall insists. Only 3.5% of fines are contested. The percentage is the same as before but there are many more cases to deal with. And the services are therefore overwhelmed. For the moment the municipality recognizes 1,221 challenges in September but we will probably be around 3,000 appeals in October.
Blame it also on a big bug of which residents have been victims, sometimes in series since their car was checked several days in a row, recognizes Emilion Esnault, security assistant at the town hall of Toulouse: “When we increase the number of controls, obviously we come across more vehicles where parking has not been paid. So mechanically, there may be a little more recourse.
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Emilion Esnault: “So far, on the September figures, on a 3.5% recourse on parking passes that have been issued. This is the same rate as what we have experienced in previous years, without Lapi. Then maybe it can be improved. We experienced a small system bug at one point, in that some resident subscribers were not going up in the system. And so this little bug has been fixed as will others if we had any. In any case, we remain attentive each time the teams receive appeals and carefully study the reason for the appeal. Obviously the FPS is in these cases canceled and we try to continuously improve the systemto reduce the number of problems.
It was also the users who alerted the municipality to the problem, but a little late, by the time the first fine letters arrived. The municipality insists. The bug has been fixed. The appeals are all in the process of being settled and subscribers are not obliged to pay before filing their appeal.