Mate of mine got ticket in the southside about 6 months ago, took it to Parking Adjudicator, who sent a map asking him to mark exact place where he had parked on it. He returned it about two months ago and has heard nothing since, so it certainly isn't a quick process!
In the meantime, you might want to make a nuisance of yourself by requesting from the council a copy of the particular Road Traffic Order to cover the restrictions or Controlled Parking Zone in the street where you parked - you never know, they might just have marked something out wrong.
Best source of advice on these matters is a website called Pepipoo:
http://www.pepipoo.com/In particular, their forums have a specific parking thread:
http://forums.pepipoo.com/index.php?s=8 ... owforum=30Most cases involve English examples, but almost all of them are similar to the situation in Glasgow i.e. Parking has been decriminalised and taken over the local authority. Thank Christ we don't really have the same problem with rogue clampers up here though!
Take a look at this Edinburgh example for an idea of the kind of thing you might want to request from the council in a case like this:
http://forums.pepipoo.com/index.php?showtopic=27380It's also quite eye-opening to see just how many private operators exist (again, mostly down south) who run car parks for retail parks and places like MacDonald's, and who will send tickets and threats of legal action which imply they have the same powers to demand information and payment as the councils have. The answer, in most cases, is to simply ignore them, the onus being entirely on them to prove who was driving the car and whether they had broken a contract.
The main scandal, though, is just how easy it is for these companies to get owner info from the DVLA without any checks whatsoever on how ethically they use it. I'm not suggesting we should all park anywhere we like, but with the power to impose a fiscal penalty comes a degree of responsibility and accountability!
Anyways, I digress, hope the above proves useful, I lost hours one day reading the thread about the BP filling station at Gatwick....