Australia — TAKE a walk through any street in Sydney where there are parking meters and you can expect to find more than 50 per cent of cars with mobility stickers stuck to their windscreens. The stickers allow all-day free parking in disabled spaces, as well as any metered area where parking for an hour or more is permitted. Of course, they are only supposed to be used when transporting a person with a disability. The Herald was flooded with complaints of able-bodied people abusing the scheme after an article was published on Saturday highlighting the problem on one city block in Kent Street. In the same block, between Market and King streets, it was business as usual yesterday with 15 out of 33 cars displaying the mobility parking tags and avoiding the need to pay. The manager of one building in the street, who has asked not to be named, said he had noticed a steady increase in the number of cars using the stickers in recent years. "They are mainly professional people. They are rorting this scheme for the handicapped and depriving the ratepayers of hard-to-get revenue," he said. "They come in the morning and they don't move all day. It leaves a sour taste in your mouth to see people exploiting the system." Further up Kent Street in the block north of Margaret Street, nine out of 14 cars were using the stickers at midday. Around the corner in Napoleon Street, nine out of 19 cars had the park-anywhere-for-free stickers, including a Mitsubishi with a new permit that lasts until 2009. If the City of Sydney Council is worried about loss of revenue resulting from the scheme's abuse, it is not saying. It made $16.5 million from its parking meters last year by charging $4.40 an hour during business hours, but a council spokesman, Josh Mackenzie, declined to estimate how much revenue might be forgone each day. One reader, Gordon Pelletier of Cremorne, said: "Go to Paddy's Market, particularly on a Saturday after 7am, to see street after street packed with cars showing disabled stickers. Most of the drivers appear to be able-bodied vendors at the markets who rely on their disabled stickers to park all day for free while they make money selling at the markets." Ian Muir, of Lavender Bay, said: "On any given weekday in business hours, up to half the cars parked here have disability permits to the point where genuine locals and their visitors are being denied parking." Roads in Bondi, Chatswood, Ultimo, Haberfield and any street near a university were also nominated by readers as areas in which the scheme's systemic abuse was obvious. But despite the anger, there is no agreement on how the abuse might be reduced. John Moxon, the vice-president of the Physical Disability Council of NSW, said the Roads and Traffic Authority had invited his group to a forum on the scheme when the Herald began making inquiries about it. Mr Moxon said that while he was concerned about the scheme's abuse, he thought the only way to reduce it would be to carry out an occasional blitz that caught out people misusing the disabled-parking tags. Source Sydney Morning Herald, 31 January 2006 - Matthew Moore ###