Issues 28/07/2002

Wardens: menace or minders?

His distinctive brown uniform puts every driver on the alert. He has all the fearsome attributes of the traffic policeman but none of his compensations. He is practically useless in a traffic accident and he has no wheels, other than a silly little moped, to get around and chase the serious pests on the road.

Just try and stop the car for a quick dash into the newsagents for your paper however, and he immediately turns up, walking with an exaggerated swagger caused by about seven and a half kilos of equipment strapped to his belt. Guess who it is? That's right! It's your Friendly Neighbourhood Warden fighting crime and keeping your streets safe from, well, you actually. The average driver going from A to B comes across several contraventions that simply cry out for a policeman or a traffic warden to take heed; cars crawling on the overtaking lane, trucks and buses spewing fumes, over speeding, overtaking on bends and on the crests of hills, trucks with uncovered loads. And where are the police when there is someone, blind drunk, weaving all over the road at the weekend? For the driver in Malta there are only two real chances of getting a traffic fine: either a traffic policeman catches him without a seatbelt and pulls him over, or he parks in the wrong place and returns to find that a warden has given him a ticket. That's it, more or less. Why is this? Could the reason be that these are the two contraventions most likely to be committed by the mildest drivers and therefore those least likely to give trouble?

Like everything else, wardens are no better and no worse than the way they are perceived by the public they are meant to serve. Actually they are the hapless victims of a PR exercise gone sadly wrong. They should have spent the first few months helping little old ladies across the road and only when we had learned to respect and trust them, should they have started to slap the fines. One problem seems to be that too often, wardens are not comfortable discussing things with the driver. Many of them are callow youths who are not trained to handle confrontation without resorting to abuse, so they either end up being needlessly brusque or they skulk behind corners and whip out to give the ticket when the driver is safely far away, a performance hardly calculated to enhance their prestige in our eyes and win our breathless admiration.

No matter how much they protest that they are Our Friendly Neighbourhood Wardens, we only see them as the menaces that hand out parking fines. Admittedly, this is not entirely a bad thing. Those whose garages used to be regularly obstructed, have found them to be a boon and a blessing and they certainly serve as a deterrent to those who would leave their car in the way and go off to do a couple of hours' shopping. On the whole, thanks to them, parking has become a more orderly affair and drivers are being more careful.

However, have you ever seen a warden do anything else besides patrol the pavements, looking at the parked cars? Speaking purely from personal experience, I actually saw one stopping a man from washing his car in the street because of the water spillage or something. Others are so blinkered, or know so little of the law, that they see contraventions where none exist and simultaneously refuse to use what meager judgement and common sense they might have.

On the whole drivers are ready to admit when they are in the wrong, and most pay their fines without a murmur. It is the knowledge that they are up against someone who refuses to see reason or explain, and is likely to fly off the handle, that creates most resentment among drivers. In fact it is the anecdotes of gross unfairness that make the rounds.

For instance, who hasn't heard of the warden who chastised a woman for not wearing her seatbelt as she was getting out of the car? The warden on duty gave her a telling off for not wearing her seat belt and threatened to book her next time he caught her at it.

Then there's the case of the warden who hung a plumb line off the bumper of a car to determine by how many millimeters it might have been overhanging the next parking bay so he could determine if he could slap another ticket. Even worse is the case of the warden who called a woman he was booking a prostitute.

In conclusion, we do need wardens to minimise the effects of selfish road use on our lives, but perhaps it is time they laid off the fines somewhat and started being seen to do something other than play petty games with us and our cars.

Mario Schembri Wismayer reporting