Websites bend law to save you cash

A website which calculates the likelihood of you being fined for parking without a ticket is the latest online scheme aimed at bending the law.
www.alertepv.com uses data from users who pass on information about traffic wardens’ movements.

It then makes calculations on how likely it is you will get a ticket – although creator Benoît Oberlé says he offers no guarantees of accuracy.

So far he says 10,000 members have signed up. He believes 100,000 are needed for efficient coverage of the whole country. The website currently claims exhaustive coverage of Paris, Lyon, Marseille and some areas of Strasbourg, Nantes and Rennes.

Mr Oberlé says he was inspired by his own experiences of “collecting parking tickets when I went to work.”

MP Gilles Carrez last month suggested that basic parking fines should rise from e11 to e20 because too many people are deliberately risking one.

Legal experts say there appears to be nothing illegal about a scheme to pool such information, much like it is legal to use radar warning equipment in cars that use data about known positions of cameras (as opposed to gadgets that physically detect their presence which are illegal in France).

The scheme joins another option of getting round the law – a network of informal insurance schemes which pay out if you are fined for not having a ticket on buses and the underground.

Insurance groups which offer to pay fines are more of a legal grey area as they explicitly involve people travelling without paying – this may explain why they are not set up as officially-declared bodies.

Members can sign up online and pay a small regular sum into a fund and are paid back if they are caught and fined for not having a ticket.

Scheme organiser RATP (the acronym of their name, Réseau pour l’Abolition des Transports Payants – Network for the Abolition of Paid-for Transport– looks deliberately like that of the Paris transport authority) admit that the legal position is ambiguous.

They say that while legally everyone is responsible for their own fines, there is no law against “financial solidarity.”

However the group add that “incitement to fraud” is against the law.

They argue transport should be a free public service to help poorer people get into the town centres.

A spokesman for the official RATP said while encouraging debate on free transport was “interesting,” such schemes would “harm the system” and mean “less buses.”