The guarantee body deliberates this week an appeal by Associated European Motorists that also questions Lexnet’s rulings by suppressing individual votes in the notification of judicial decisions
limited parking areas painted in color green, orange or sand browndepending on the city in question, or colorful zebra crossings. Motoristas Europeos Asociados finds irregularities in the innovations that certain town halls opt for and that They are not included in the official catalog of signals of traffic. This type of signaling can cause risk to road safety and also legal uncertainty, and more since a Supreme Court ruling According to this organization, on December 2019, he gave the municipalities license to create signals not contemplated in State legislation.
The matter is of constitutional interest, as ruled in April 2021 by the First Chamber of the Constitutional Court, which this coming Monday will begin deliberating the presentation of the president of the body, Cándido Conde-Pumpido, for the appeal filed against the decision of the Supreme Court. In essence, the Contentious-Administrative Chamber of the high court gave finality to a previous decision of the Superior Court of Justice of Madrid in the sense of endorse the competence of the capital’s City Council to establish certain limited parking measures.
signs out of catalog
According to the appellants, the authorization given by the Supreme Court so that the municipalities can create and use signals not contemplated in the national and international highway legislation violates the right to free movement of Spaniards throughout the national territory with guarantees of equality (article 19 of the Constitution), in addition to jeopardizing the road safety of millions of national and foreign citizens who are forced to know the signs that could be invented the most of 8,000 town halls that exist in our country.
He president of Associated European Motorists, Mario Arnaldoregrets in conversation with THE NEWSPAPER OF SPAIN that as things stand now, the Spanish town councils could, if it occurred to them, “paint the zebra crossings in colors, or replace stop signs with sunflowers”. Not to mention the language to be used in the complementary panels of the signs, “This would be chaos,” she adds.
Another aspect of the appeal that the Constitutional Court will debate has to do with a matter of legal certainty, given that the motorists had to appeal to the Supreme Court against the resolution of the TSJ contrary to their interests without knowing the arguments of two of the five magistrates of the Chamber, who took their side and expressed their disagreement in separate dissenting votes. They were formally notified of 22 pages of the 30 pages of the complete sentence.
Supreme Court Decision
The ruling of the Supreme Court, of which the Magistrate Octavio Juan Herrerocame to confirm what was previously said by the Madrid superior court when endorsing the content of the Mobility Ordinance for the City of Madrid of 2014, which is the one that regulated the ‘invented’ signs according to the appellants in relation to limited parking areas, in addition to other aspects related to traffic that were also questioned by drivers.
According to the complainants, The official color for this type of restrictions is blueand by using different ones, the City Council appropriated powers that do not correspond to it becauseTraffic signaling is a state matter. The court of instance responded that the Ordinance did not say anything about the color of the discontinuous blue-orange road markings used to mark restricted parking spaces, it only spoke of “special signage”, and that if the City Council painted them like this they could not be subject to any resource.
Prerogative of the municipalities
This idea was repeated in the Supreme Court, since the City Council’s competence to establish limited parking measures was endorsed, which in the opinion of the high court “includes the corresponding signage.” This signage, according to the Supreme Court, is “instrument for the execution or effectiveness of the established regulationin this case the parking lot, which means that it is the signaling that serves the established regulation and, therefore, it is the regulation that conditions the need and scope of the signaling and not the other way around”.
In this case, according to the Supreme Court, it was about regulating the so-called SER parking in the center of Madrid, “of content and scope specified in the Ordinance and very different from the traditional limitation or blue zone referred to in the sectoral regulations invoked by the appellant association”. For all these reasons, it concluded that “the challenged Mobility Ordinance, by establishing the road signs corresponding to the parking regime contemplated therein, does not invade powers or contradict the regulations” state.