Help me stop getting parking tickets!

[Nonametonight]

I'm a single parent to a young baby. Where I live, none of the houses have off road parking so everyone has to park in the street. Trouble is, we're also competing with commuters who don't want to pay for the station car park. This means that at some times of day, there's no where at all to park within 10 minutes of my house.
At the moment I am ending up parking on double yellow lines, just because I have to park somewhere close to my house to be able to get shopping and baby out of the car without leaving baby unsupervised. But I'm getting so many parking tickets! What am I missing here? (The commuters don't leave until after baby's bedtime, so waiting till the evening to unload the shopping doesn't work)

Not sure getting the police involved by starting a harassment campaign - where it's extremely obvious to within a short run of houses where the perpetrator lives - will actually improve things.

They've probably got dashcams, so it wouldn't be difficult to find where the perpetrator comes from/goes back to. I suppose, if the parking tickets aren't enough excitement, a brick through your window might add a bit of extra delight to it all...

Just get the big stuff delivered and pop out for your own fruit/veg/dairy and meat

Back when I was a pre teen, mum used to send me to the shop/stalls to get the basics, the bread, eggs, tins, cleaning products etc and then she would go get the perishables - I took the trolley, she carried a bag - home delivery long before it was a thing :)

This

Quite a few areas near me have become residents only as they were getting clogged with commuters

Residents parking zone sorts it - sometimes it’s only restricted for an hour in the mid morning, so deters the people who dump their car all day but doesn’t cause you too much of an issue re visitors/tradesmen wanting to be able to park.

Talk to people in your area and petition your local government to put a residents' parking program in place. You shouldn't have to put up with people plonking their vehicles all over your street.

I recommend getting a big pram or shopping trolley, putting the baby in a sling, and shopping on foot. Get big and bulky things delivered, perhaps.

If they're spaces available to everybody on a public road, why are the commuters 'hogging' them and not the residents, who, I'm guessing (from OP's comments) probably 'hog' them much more than the commuters. Surely they too also 'don't want to pay' to use the car parks?

I agree, but UK cities are in a mess vis-a-vis public transport, parking and cars. You have huge numbers of people living at high enough density to have no parking BUT also being dependent on cars because all the other options are shit. At least the OP presumably lives centrally enough that she can walk to shops and services, which is a step towards reducing the problem. When people choose to live further out of town "so I can have offstreet parking," they are putting themselves in a position where they will probably have to drive to everything, increasing the number of car trips going on and making the problem worse at the macro level.

Quite a few of the streets close to stations near me have limited parking arrangement, so “residents only” until 10.30 am and vigilant traffic wardens. It means parking is easily available for residents since most commuters need to park all day so learn to avoid those streets. It does however push the issue onto neighbouring streets, whose residents then have to apply for something similar ……..

Take a sling and pram/buggy. Park ten minutes away legally. Baby in sling, shopping in both the basket and the seat/bassinet of the pram?

And contact the council. I live near the station in my town and all surrounding roads are now permit only in the hours commuters need parking.