Bayside Council sees record revenue from parking fines in 2022

Things in Sydney have returned to the way they were before the pandemic, including the number of parking fines being issued by local councils.

In 2022, Bayside Council handed out more than 31,000 parking tickets for the first time since 2019. Altogether, 31,629 fines were written, according to data obtained by the Bayside Beacon under Freedom of Information laws.

That figure marks a 5.8% increase over 2021 and a 9.3% increase over COVID-ravaged 2020.

Lockdown rules had a major impact on the number of parking fines in the area. Council wrote 2,900 tickets in February 2020. After the ban on non-essential activities in March, the number dropped to 1,773 in April.

Activity began to increase toward the end of that year and into 2021. The second major lockdown in the late-2021 caused a major dip, bottoming in August with only 566 fines.

Ticket rates were higher in 2022, with January clocking the biggest month at over 3,600 citations.

Record revenue

And while 2022 didn’t see quite as many tickets as 2019, an increase in the average fine from $195 to $204 meant 2022 was a record year of parking fine revenue for the council.

On average, the council issued $538,000 in parking fines each month, for a total value of almost $6.5M for the year.

Fine amounts are set by the State Government and not the council.

Beware of No Stopping signs

According to Revenue NSW data, by far the greatest number of tickets were written for disobeying no stopping signs. There were 10,077 of these fines in 2022, representing 31.9% of the total and worth $2.8M to council coffers.

The second most common infringement was for parking continuously for longer than indicated, which generated 6,714 citations.

Most fined suburbs

As anyone who has tried to find a street spot in front of Hong Ha knows, parking in Mascot is at a premium. Mascot was the most fined suburb in Bayside for the 2022 calendar year, with 4,734 tickets. That’s 15% of all fines in Bayside, which is much smaller than the suburb’s 21% share five years ago.

Punching well above its weight is Brighton-Le-Sands, which has far less people but came in just under Mascot with 4,733 tickets. In 2022, the suburb saw more than double the number of tickets written in 2018. This is likely due to the introduction of timed parking on the foreshore over that period.