I think one has to view DDC's statements on their car parking policy with a certain amount of reserve. Her Indoors managed to collect the above ticket whilst I was away. Every time I come home, the car is littered with used pay and display tickets from Dover carparks (plus the contents of the ashtray are nearly up to the rear view mirror and the petrol tank is hovering on empty)! On this occasion, she unwittingly managed to collect a fine and is spitting bullets.
She was on her way home from visiting her mum in a care home in Kearsney and remembered the moggies had run out of Whiskas. Thinking that the charging period expired at 1730, she parked in Stembrook and popped into Somerfields for a single £3 purchase of catfood. Returning to the car a few minutes after leaving it, she found it adorned with the parking ticket shown above. As can be seen, the time of issue is 1739, twentyone minutes before the charging period expired for the day. The carpark was largely empty so DDC has charged us this sum for the privilege of renting a few square feet of empty tarmac for a pound a minute. Nice work if you can get it. What next, wheel clamping?
By this time, the residents of Deal, under the same Dover District administration, would have been parking for nothing for nearly two hours. One does wonder if they are living in New Deal and we are living in Raw Deal. Is it possible that one of their unemployed traffic wardens had nipped down to Dover to round off the day by catching some sucker unawares and thereby top up the coffers to help pay for the Wheeler Dealers just up the coast?
There is no gainsaying that Her Indoors was caught bang to rights so we have no quibble with coughing up. What it does illustrate, however, is that it is DDC policy to pay traffic wardens to impose swingeing fines on Dovorian residents at the fag end of the day for no other reason than to swell the coffers. Nobody else was going to use this space in the remaining twentyone minutes in an otherwise almost deserted carpark so there is no case for saying that it conformed to any policy of charging parking fees to contribute to a rapid turnover of spaces and give everybody a fair crack of the whip.
Had my other half realised that Stembrook was still charging at that time of day, she would have turned off at Beaconsfield and gone to the Spar in London Road. As it is, her £3 pack of catfood has now cost £28 and the moggies have been instructed to go easy on it. In the wider context, one wonders how much trade Somerfields loses through people avoiding Stembrook carpark because the cost of parking tickets makes it not worth popping in for minor purchases. In cases like this, the Somersfields staff must look out at the traffic warden lurking in their empty DDC carpark and wonder what they have done for DDC to be victimising them in this way. If DDC's grand plan for an ASDA supermarket a stone's throw away ever comes to fruition, they are doomed anyway.
Having got over the pain of being fleeced, I have to say that I thoroughly endorse DDC's malevolent attitude towards Dovorian car owners and local shopping. I don't like cars and I don't like shopping, regarding them as necessary evils to be avoided wherever possible.
If they wanted to give me the job, I would be the Traffic Warden from Hell!
