Books by Barrie Segal

The Parking Ticket Awards: Crazy Councils, Meter Madness and Traffic Warden Hell was first published in 2007. It grew out of Barrie's parking campaigning and the Crazy Parking Ticket Awards that AppealNow says he started in 2003.

The book is intentionally different from a legal manual. It collects absurd, frustrating and sometimes comic examples of parking enforcement. Goodreads describes it as a humorous collection of unusual traffic-fining stories, while Barrie's later material includes examples involving broken-down vehicles, service vehicles and objects that were not conventional cars at all.

The humour has a purpose: parking rules are technical and often difficult to explain, whereas an obviously strange real-world example immediately makes the underlying enforcement issue understandable.

This is the more substantial practical counterpart to The Parking Ticket Awards. The 2015 Kindle edition runs to 187 pages and was designed to follow a parking dispute from the initial penalty through to the adjudication stage.

The book description says it covers parking tickets, clamping and towing, provides a detailed index and includes appeal templates derived from Barrie's case experience. That description refers to more than 60,000 parking tickets reviewed and 7,000 adjudicator cases. Those figures are later than the 30,000-ticket figure on the older AppealNow biography, so the two should be understood as snapshots taken at different stages of the work.

The Evening Standard covered the book in 2015 and its motoring correspondent wrote the introduction.

The 5 Great Myths of Public Speaking

Published in 2016, this short guide attacks the idea that good speakers are simply born with a mysterious natural gift. Barrie's argument is rooted in his own experience: an early speech went badly, so he learned techniques for preparation and delivery and then spent decades using them in professional lectures, media appearances and public speaking.

The book addresses common anxieties such as memorising a speech and the belief that confidence must come before practice. Instead, it presents speaking as a learnable skill.