They’ll get you wherever you hide. Either you see the traffic warden lumbering threateningly towards you, having already furtively entered your number on his magic parking-ticket box, or you don’t. That’s when he’s in mufti, lurking on the street corner, muttering into a mobile to his uniformed mate to get round here now because you’ve just put your car on a yellow line and nipped into Coffee Republic.
Traffic wardens issue nearly six million tickets a year now – twice as many as they did seven years ago. Last year motorists paid nearly £1 billion in fines. Either this means we’re all getting worse at finding legal places to park, or it means the traffic wardens are cheating and ticketing people who haven’t really done anything wrong.
Anyone with a car knows this is war. You wouldn’t be a London driver if you didn’t have a story about the enemy agent who’d already written the ticket out ready to slap on your windscreen two seconds after your meter expired, or about getting a ticket when you were legally parked. It’s socially OK to be angry, as long as it’s at a traffic warden.
The press is full of stories of traffic wardens that make us even angrier. This summer we read (with bulging veins and clenched fists) that wardens were offered extra points on their Argos cards for issuing above-average numbers of tickets. Two years ago, to the rage of the general population, National Car Parks promised a Vauxhall Corsa for the warden who got most motorists in Westminster. The story I like most is from the BBC by undercover reporter Nkem Ifejika. He took a job as a parking attendant (the official ‘don’t hate us’ term for traffic wardens) with APCOA, in Kensington and Chelsea, and emerged a few months later to spill the beans.
And it turned out that every driver’s worst imaginings were true. You really did fail as a trainee warden if you didn’t issue enough tickets. You really were supposed to ticket abandoned cars and generally cheat any which way you could to keep your ticketing score high.
Nkem Ifejika’s report had other interesting things in it too, things that, against my driver’s will, began to make me feel just the tiniest bit sorry for the wardens. For one thing, it pointed out the social decline of the job. Back in the days of The Beatles, traffic wardens might have been lovely meter maids, but now they’re much more likely to be male, black and relatively newly arrived in this country. Who else but a newcomer, who didn’t know his rights, would accept a job that pays less than the minimum wage for the first three months and has to pad around the streets for an average of 15 miles a day in British weather while risking a lot of scary abuse from drivers?
A traffic warden’s lot is not a happy one, then, as my neighbour, John, confirms. He’s a minicab driver who came from Nigeria twenty years ago. Every Nigerian he knows in London is either a taxi driver or a traffic warden – the legal ones are drivers, he says, and the illegal ones are traffic wardens. As a fully paid up member of the driver fraternity, who spends most of his days dodging parking fines like the best of us, he probably hates wardens more than most. But he pities them, too. When he found out that the son of someone he knew was working as a traffic warden, he went round to the mother’s house and told her: “You’ve got to stop him. Being a traffic warden is no job for a God-fearing man.”
Apart from anything else, it isn’t safe. John ticks off the disadvantages. People get so angry that they hit you. Or they try to run you down. Or they shoot at you.
Then there’s the lack of money, and, worse, the social embarrassment of telling girls you’re a traffic warden by trade. Admitting to being a traffic warden, John says, has no disco credibility. No one likes doing it or talking about it. It’s a sign of failure.
Many of the minicab drivers whose lunch breaks young Nigerian traffic wardens like to disturb are also Nigerian.
And here John’s face breaks into a great beaming smile.
“I see them out of my rear view mirror, tiptoeing up behind while I’m having my sandwich, parked in the shade. And if I see from their faces that they’re Nigerian, do you know what I do?”
He grins even wider. “I cuss ‘em.”
“Not English cussing – you know, an insult or two. No, real cussing, the kind we do in Yoruba. I tell them things that mean they won’t sleep easy in their beds. In my culture you have to respect people older than yourself; and I tell those young men things that will scare them for weeks and months.”
This sounds potentially useful. And, before I can even whip out a notebook and jot down some good Yoruba curses to frighten away any Nigerian traffic warden who might cross my path, John obliges.
“Do you know the best cuss of all,” he adds, with a mixture of pleasure and pity in his voice, “the one that’s really guaranteed to keep them up all night worrying?”
I shake my head eagerly. But the phrase that follows kills all my hatred of traffic wardens so quickly and completely that I almost want to rush out and start taking food parcels and job offers to the poor misunderstood victims instead.
“I say the worst curse any traffic warden could ever want to hear,” John snickers. “I say, ‘may your sons and your sons’ sons all be traffic wardens.’”
Send us your tales of terrible traffic wardens: e-mail Urban Fox here and read your comments, below.
If you think the traffic wardens are bad, the clampers are worse. Several years ago I parked in Camden just as some council workmen were washing the street. They were using a machine that created a lot of foam that covered the white lines delineating the bays. Consequently, I put my money in the wrong meter. When I returned my car was clamped. I had to pay before they would release it and they didn’t have time for what they called my ‘excuses’. I later wrote to them to get my money back. They replied; "The explanation you give is not listed as an acceptable excuse." Or, in other words, “we've got your money and we're keeping it.”
Theo Chalmers, Milton Keynes 
