Mean machine

I kind of resent paying car parking fees, although I recognise with a sigh, that councils have to raise money somehow, and it all goes into a pot that, hopefully, gets well spent.   Some of it even gets spent on building car parks.   None the less, it has given me a small pleasure in times past, to hand over a parking ticket when I am leaving a car park, to someone who is just arriving and who can make use of the unexpired time.   I have also, to my disproportionate delight, occasionally been given such a ticket.

The financial dynamics of car parks are well-known.  People tend to buy more time than they actually use, and that means that the council collects more money than is represented by the number of parking spaces and their price per hour.  Various schemes have been invented to maximise this surplus.

We have new parking machines installed in Laval.  They take your photograph, which I don't like, and you have to put in your car registration that gets printed on the ticket so you can't pass the unexpired time on to someone else.  It happens that I put in €2 that was enough to last the whole day when I only needed the morning.  But I can't give the ticket away to anyone.

This is petty and mean.  Two people lose out directly - I lose the pleasure of giving the ticket away, and a random person loses out on the free parking.  But society loses too: we are deprived of a small opportunity to show a bit of fraternité towards our fellow citizens and Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité becomes, a little bit more, just a slogan.