You'll Soon Have More Time to Get Back to Your Car Before Copping a Parking Ticket

Picture this: you've parked your car on a side street really far away, paid for a ticket till 2pm, gotten distracted by an email (or a cute dog) and sprinted back for 2.02pm. Boom, you've copped a parking ticket. It's a scenario a lot of us are way too familiar with. And our bank accounts are, frankly, sick of it — those $112 tickets really add up.

Thankfully, you'll soon have a bit longer to get back to your car, with the NSW Government introducing a ten-minute grace period from January 31, 2019. So, in our hypothetical situation, you've got an extra eight minutes to pat that pooch and put more money in the meter.

The grace period applies to all ticketed and coupon parking, which the Government says makes up for the "majority of overstay parking offences". If the meter doesn't issue a ticket — it's one of those machines where you input your number plate, for example — the grace period doesn't apply. Nor do private car parks, or parks in clearways, bus lanes, transit lanes, mail zones, no stopping areas, loading zones or special event zones (but you probably shouldn't be parking there anyway).

In some more great news for our dire post-holidays bank accounts, from March 1, 2019, some parking fines might actually get cheaper. From this date, councils and universities will be able to reduce level 2 parking fines (which is what you get for overstaying in a park, parking without a ticket, stopping in a mail zone, etc) from $112 to $80. More money for gelato and spritzes, we say.

The ten-minute grace period will be introduced on January 31, 2019. For more information, head to the NSW Government website.

Image: Kitti Smallbone.