5 August (Part 2) - Phone only parking by stealth
Bexley
council has found another way of extracting money from your pocket and take
another small step towards making living and working in the borough more unpleasant.
It was the unmentionable 42 year old from Sidcup who first decided that
people
with no mobile phone or no bank card couldn’t park in certain roads; then he
extended phone parking into the off-street car parks. Later he announced that car park
cash machines would be reduced in number
causing those who haven’t got the requisite hardware or inclination to use it to
search harder and walk further to pay with coins. It does nothing to make life easier.
It’s inevitable that all the cash machines will eventually disappear. The
council says they are too expensive and those it owns won’t last for ever.
Meanwhile we have an interim step. If the one remaining cash machine is
unserviceable for any reason and the driver is not able to use the phone parking system
he must go and do business in another borough. I suspect it has always
been thus since phone parking was introduced and this move merely legitimises
the practice. Craske may be gone but his legacy lives on.