The Study On Legal Liability Of Parking Service

Nowadays, vehicles have become an important transportation tool. By the end of 2015, the population of vehicles has already reached 279 million, of which 172 million were cars; and the population of small passenger vehicles reached 136 million, of which 124 million were private cars, accounting for 91.53%. In the pursuit of efficient conveniences of modern lives today, the cars do have great advantage for people to travel more conveniently, while the cars' parking and custody problems have also become an issue in major cities. Besides, the disputes of parking problems have been increasing for years. When these cases are being settled, there are many similar cases with extraordinarily different sentences. And the reasons for this situation are that the rights and obligations between parking lot managers and cars' owners, including parkers, were not defined clearly. When the cars are stolen or damaged, both are sticking to their own opinions, and both have different notions of the vehicle loss that one should assure. Therefore, in the civil legislation of our country, there is no clear definition about the legal relationship of the parking service. In addition, the understandings of the legal relationship of parking service are also different in academic circles.In view of above problems, the legal relationship between the car owners and parking lot managers will be made as the entry point in this passage, and the liability of the service in parking will also be identified. The paper will be presented into five parts except introduction and conclusion.The first part is the problems of judicial determination on parking service's legal liability at present. At the beginning, the writer analyzes and summarizes some typical cases of parking disputes by three aspects. The first aspect is the definition of the parking service's legal relationship. The second aspect is the effect of format clauses and exception clauses in parking service. The third aspect is the applicative doctrine of liability fixation to affirm the parking lot managers' responsibility. The problems occurred in current cases which are being tried by the court are analyzed through these three aspects. What's more, the causation of these problems is also discussed. It is believed that there are five general reasons:(1) the unclear rights and obligations between parking lot managers and car owners;(2) legislation deficiency on parking service;(3) the varied definition of the legal relationship of the parking service in our country's academic circles;(4) the similarity between vehicle custody contracts and venue rental contracts;(5) lacking of a scientific, rational and systemic standard to manage diverse parking lots efficiently.The second part analyzes the legal relationship of the parking service. The writer mainly discusses the difference of vehicle custody contracts and venue rental contracts by analyzing their definitions, constitutive requirements and how to identify the parking managers' responsibility in the cases. These also draw the following parts.The third part reveals the legal relationship of parking service and the analysis in category of the confirmation of legal liability. In this passage, the parking lot is divided into special parking lot and public parking lot, and this paper only discussed the public parking lot. The public parking lot includes professional parking lots, consumption places' parking lots, residential areas' parking lots, public welfare parking lots; the public welfare parking lot also divides into two types, the quasi-public welfare parking lot and the pure welfare parking lot. On the basis of the reasonable classification of parking lots, according to the characters of parking lots and the mental expectations formed by vehicles' owners, the writer clarifies the legal relationship between the vehicle owners and the parking lots' managers so as to determine the legal liability of the parking service.The fourth part discusses other relevant problems of parking service's legal liability, including the effects of format clauses and exception clauses, distributing burden of proof and balancing the rights and obligations between the vehicle owners and the parking lots' managers.The fifth part gives a legislative proposal about how to solve the legal liability identification of the parking service----legislating a national "Parking Management Act." It contains establishing the basic identification principles of parking service's legal responsibility, classifying the category of parking lot reasonably, summarizing the legal relationship and the responsibility determination of all kinds of parking services, founding parking service guild and introducing correlative insurance system.