A six-kind taxonomy of rejected number-plate entries at a pay-by-plate car-park machine becomes a tiered infringement schedule, with appeals decided on the kind coded from the keypad log.
A shopping-centre car-park operator replaces one flat infringement with a schedule and asks appellants to name their kind
An appeal against a car-park infringement now succeeds only when the driver has ticked the same kind of mistake that the coders had already written down. Nearly Paid, Fully Fined, a poster released today by Ms Ylva Onyekwere with Dr Runa Adegoke and Associate Professor Kwame Lindqvist of the School of Emergent Priorities, sets out the six kinds and the schedule that follows from them.
The hardest part was agreeing what to call each kind, and the second hardest was agreeing to stop.
— Ms Ylva Onyekwere, Doctoral Candidate
The poster sets keypad records from five shopping-centre car parks against camera readings, sorts 2,418 rejected number-plate entries into six kinds (Swap, Lookalike, Slip, Other car, Hire plate and Described), and asks a panel of exiting drivers to rate each kind for fault. The operator’s single infringement had fallen on every kind at much the same rate, whatever the panel made of it.
The operator has adopted a Culpability Schedule that gives each kind its own tier. Notices will print the coded kind, and the appeal form carries six tick-boxes where it carried none. In a pilot of 212 appeals the ticked kind and the coded kind agreed in a little over half, and the remainder were recorded as unclassified. The release reflects the University’s settled view that a mistake is easier to forgive once it has a name.
Associate Professor Lindqvist said the five car-park offices had been “generous with their keypad logs and patient with the questions.”
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.1r4c33.