Driving our cars today seems to offer fewer and fewer pleasure: we have speed cameras at every turn, we have expensive fuel and we have increasingly congested roads. Even when it comes to parking there always seems to be problems finding a space.
The only consolation, in recent times, was when a fellow motorist offered you their pay-and-display ticket with enough time remaining to enable you to park for free. This simple neighbourly gesture was always enough to put a smile on my face and restored my faith in humanity.
But if you've been to a car park recently you'll find that your attempts at being neighbourly have been thwarted. Increasingly, you now have to enter either all or part of your registration number so that you can't give the ticket to anyone else. Of course I can see the finance directors' rationale: more money for the coffers, but for the actual amount of additional revenue raised set against the additional cost of the more complex machines, it is a mean-spirited act.
Whether or not you visit car parks that have the 'mean machines', as I'll brand them, there is the other issue: the actual cost of parking. I'm not really bothered whether I pay £1 or £2 per hour, what I really object to is the cynical pricing policy. How often have you found a ticket machine where the pricing is something like: 70p for 1 hour; £1.30 for 2-3 hours and £1.80 for 3-4 hours and so on? That's right, every time you visit such a machine you can guarantee that you have 60p in change or pound coins only. Why don't councils opt for round figures? £1 for an hour; £2 for 2 hours and so on.
The reason is obvious and it is another devious ploy to extract maximum revenues from the motorist that is trying to visit the village/town/city centre and spend money in the shops (keeping shops in business and enabling them to pay their local rates back to the mean-spirited councils).
To encourage shoppers back into town and city centres we need parking policies that actually encourage visits and help dissuade us from shopping at the out-of-town centres where parking is free.
What we pay when we park our cars is not going to change the course of history, but councils should wake up to the fact that they should be encouraging visits to town centres, that they shouldn't be preventing neighbourly gestures and they should realise that we're not as stupid as they think.
