Honesty policy

A heavy fine for a momentary lapse. And the discs aren’t numbered or dated, so you can’t prove you carry them – the way you can’t prove you have a driving licence and insurance.

There are reasons why the system needs sorting. Anyone who turns up in Littlehampton or Rustington can set a disc to park for a couple of hours in certain large central car parks for free. Anyone who turns up and doesn’t know, or find out, about the free discs for free parking pays for a ticket. That’s to say, they are ripped off.

And, of course, it’s the council tax payer who pays for ticket machines and their upkeep in car parks where no one parking for two or three hours need buy a ticket; where all such parking is, in effect-free, the machines existing to fleece the un-enlightened visitors who don’t know they don’t need them.

Council tax payers also fund the vans and the employees who scuttle about in them (why don’t they use bikes?), checking cars and putting tickets on windows (and meticulously writing on bits of paper and taking photographs from a variety of interesting angles and generally consuming a lot of the time we’re paying for).

Interestingly, or amusingly, driving back through Littlehampton after being nicked, I counted about 50 cars parked on double yellow lines between the fish stall on the seafront and the clock outside Sainsbury’s.

Some were parked in dangerous places – I know, having last summer almost hit a child pelting out from between cars with an ice cream, and on another occasion was nearly knocked off my bike negotiating the gap between cars parked on each side of the road on double yellow lines.

I doubt if Arun, or West Sussex, or anyone, collects much from these deliberate infractions of the rules; such parking continues to flourish despite the new parking wardens’ spasmodic tours.

Set beside paying £25 for forgetting a disc, double yellow lines seem a newly tempting option.

Arun should consider introducing honest numbered discs with dates. They ought to add a local residence qualification, too, if they want revenue from visitors outside Arun.

Otherwise, they should scrap the machines and make car parks what, in effect, they already are, free, with two-hour or three-hour limits.

If they keep discs (honest ones), they could offer at least partial refunds to those regular customers who, occasionally, forget to show them. And maybe someone should get rid of a lot of yellow lines, too.

Robert Hull

Elm Grove South

Barnham