When the Director General of the BBC claimed back the 23p it cost him to park a Cessna on Bruce Forsyth’s chin for his 80th birthday (or something), you may have wondered, as I did, not what the hell he thought was doing with licence payer’s money, but how on earth he managed to park anything anywhere for just 23p? The minimum spend at the cheapest car park I can think of is 70p an hour (“or part thereof”) and if you try to fob it off with anything less, on the grounds that you’re just picking up some dry cleaning and will be 15 minutes at most, the machine simply gobs your money back at you with the vehement force of a cat yakking up a coin furball. Yet if you’ve only got a pound and would, not unreasonably, like 30p back it’ll merely sit there and refer you to the sign that says it is unable to give change, despite the fact that if it doesn’t like the shape or the taste of your perfectly acceptable fifty pence coins, it’ll spit them out and glare at you with its stupid little screen as though you just tried to feed it a turd instead of the Queen’s legal tender. And then, if you leave the car park for a moment to try and get the right change from the shop 20 yards away, a git in a hat will come along and fine you sixty pounds.
            Car parking is stupidly expensive. A stand up comedian friend of mine called Simon Evans once observed that, at six pounds an hour the parking meters outside a central London McDonald’s were better off than the people working inside. How demoralising is that? To stand behind the counter pushing fries and gherkins at fat people, all the time knowing that the box on a stick outside is earning more than you are. All of this is because most car parks are owned by the local council and thus it stands to reason that the machines are annoying because they are an extension of the council brand; ie they take an extortionate amount of money from you and give you very little in return. Where I live, after 7pm for some reason, even if you only want to park for 5 minutes, it costs £1.50. A few months ago it was 50p. Then it was a pound, and now, without warning, there’s been a two hundred percent increase. Why? What exactly am I getting in return? For that money I want a bit more than just a boring old parking space, thank you. I want some kind of entertainment. Clowns, perhaps.  Alright not clowns. Everyone hates clowns and they’re not entertaining unless they’re on fire, but show dogs perhaps, or a motorcycle display team. Or a motorcycle display team comprised of show dogs jumping through hoops of burning clowns. I don’t know about you but I’d happily feed a pound and a half into a machine if, while I was doing it, a cocker spaniel in a helmet went past on a stunt bike holding a blowtorch in its mouth.
Like you, I wonder where the money goes. Certainly not into the upkeep of the car park as far as I can tell, otherwise the light above the machine would work and the git’s hat would fit properly. As far as I can make out your money is actually just spent on more signs telling you that you now have to pay more money in order to pay for more signs, while anything left over will be used to develop cruel and unusual punishments for anyone arriving two minutes late back to their car. As you read this, chances are your local council are building a camp not unlike Guantanemo Bay on an out of town industrial estate next to Staples and Homebase for the indefinite detaining and beating of anyone not displaying a valid ticket. I’ve checked on their website under the Freedom of Information Act and it turns out all the extra cash from the recent price hike in my car park (Canterbury City Council, in case you were wondering) is being used to take a technological leaf out of the new Transformers film and then, should you miss your ticket’s expiry time by just one second, the seemingly innocuous truck parked in the next bay will turn into a massive robot that will loom over the town centre, pluck you bodily out of Debenhams, smash you back into your car and then hurl you, and it, out of the county. Park that thought.