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Driver's £15 PayByPhone parking ticket costs £5,000
Brighton and Hove City Council refunds motorist after they mistakenly enter location code of parking bay as number of hours of stay while using PayByPhone system
A motorist was hit with a £5,340 parking ticket after making a mistake while trying to pay by phone.
The unknown driver inadvertently paid £5,325 too much for a parking space, which should have cost them £15.30.
Brighton and Hove City Council refunded the motorist after they mistakenly entered the location code of their parking bay as the number of hours of their stay while using the PayByPhone system.
The driver was among 540 motorists who received refunds while using the new mobile phone system in Brighton and Hove in its first year of use.
The highest number of refunds, 312 in three months, were given as the system was introduced in late 2013 - the equivalent of one for every 50 customers.
The number of refunds has increased recently, with 114 from July to September, as more motorists take up the scheme. The ratio of refunds for that period was one for every 693 motorists.
Council officials said that most of the refunds were customer errors rather than system ones.
The council has recently launched a trial of removing a number of parking machines from city streets to encourage take-up of paying by mobile phones or participating stores.
All the city's parking meters could be removed by 2017 in a bid to save thousands of pounds maintaining them.
Steve Percy, of the People's Parking Protest, said: "Not everybody has a smartphone or is comfortable using one.
"There are lots of things that go wrong with the telephone system. The signal can drop out, for example, and it seems like we have an unreliable system at the moment.
"It's costing motorists every time they call up. It seems the council are just passing on the costs to the motorists."
A Brighton and Hove City Council spokesman said: "We're pleased with how quickly the PaybyPhone system has been taken up in the city.
"The PaybyPhone system offers people more warnings before paying than any of our other systems. Errors include entering the wrong vehicle registration if they have more than one car, the wrong location number or an incorrect duration of stay - all of which can be corrected."