Doctors and nurses who save lives have been blocked from accessing car parks hundreds of times because of the fight over scarce car spaces in Canberra's three major town centres, according to official figures.
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But the medical industry is not the only sector hurt by the paucity of car spaces.
Bureaucrats in government-owned cars, cab drivers, foreign envoys and the disabled have all been delayed on a mass scale by drivers parking illegally.
Justice and Community Safety Directorate (JACS) figures show drivers have been fined more than 1000 times in the past 18 months for parking in zones exclusively for community nurses and medical practitioners in the Woden, Belconnen or Tuggeranong town centres.
The vast majority of these were in Woden, a town centre with thousands of public servants and a shopping centre.
In Woden, 787 fines were handed out to people illegally parking in zones set aside for community nurses.
ACT Health's busy community nurses provide help to people in their homes, such as looking after chemotherapy patients, taking care of people about to die, dressing wounds, giving intravenous antibiotics and adjusting catheters.
Another 69 drivers in Woden were fined for leaving vehicles in parks set aside for medical practitioners and the chair of the Woden Community Council, Jenny Stewart, said many of the fines would indicate "desperation rather than malevolence".
Dr Stewart said drivers would be risking fines so they could arrive at appointments on time after a futile search for a place to leave their vehicle.
"The pressure on the car park (to the south of the Tradies) has been enormous," Dr Stewart said.
She said a development on the same site promising more car parks should be finished by next year while the relocation of public servants in Woden to other locations in Canberra - while not good for the Woden economy - would alleviate the demand.
In Woden, the disabled and diplomats were also being squeezed out. Almost 500 fines were dished out to drivers parking illegally in disabled parks and another 48 were stung for parking in permit zones reserved for diplomats.
Only 13 drivers in Canberra's major town centres were caught altering their parking tickets in an attempt to trick inspectors in the past 18 months.
But other figures suggest thousands of drivers have attempted to fool inspectors with a sleight of hand.
Almost 40 per cent of the 31,000 fines handed out in Woden, Belconnen and Tuggeranong town centres were given for parking without a current ticket or a ticket not properly displayed.
The Office of Regulatory Service's transport regulation director, David Snowden, said parking rangers knew all the tricks drivers used.
"Parking tickets are quite distinctly marked," Mr Snowden said.
"People who make a decision to game the system do so at their own peril."
Mr Snowden said his inspectors made sure their schedules were unpredictable.
They knew groups of public servants and other workers had informal alert systems in place to tip each other off to avoid fines.
In Tuggeranong, drivers were fined 437 times for leaving cars in permit zones set aside for government vehicles.
In Belconnen, 37 people were fined for parking in taxi zones.
Trickery is not confined to the bustling town centres.
Barry Booth said on Monday he walked past a car parked in a disabled spot at Jamison which had an "energy rating" sticker from a washing machine or fridge displayed in the window in an attempt to fool inspectors.
