Driven up the wall by a trip into town

IhAVEN’T looked up the term ‘ludicrous’ in the dictionary for a while but if i did, it wouldn’t surprise me to find it illustrated with a picture of an Edinburgh city centre parking ticket.

This week, in isn’t-the-world-ridiculous news, it emerged that it is now so expensive to park in the centre of the capital that it is cheaper to risk getting a fine than pay to park all day.

That’s right, folks, for the supreme privilege of parking in Edinburgh you’re better off getting a ticket than buying one. ye gads.

Transport chiefs, in their infinite wisdom, have raised the price of parking in the city, with some areas increasing more than 11 per cent.

The hourly rate around Charlotte square, George street and st Andrew square, for example, has increased from £3.80 to £4.20 an hour.

This means that, given all three have a maximum stay of three hours, drivers could move between the areas for the full eight-hour working day at a total cost of £33.60.

Although parking fines are £60, if you pay within 14 days you pay just £30 – almost £4 cheaper than playing by the rules.

Apparently this is to ensure ‘safety and accessibility’ for road users. Not that there seems anything particularly ‘safe’ about £4.20 an hour. if anything, it sounds downright dangerous, particularly where the wallet’s concerned.

Not to worry though, the money will be spent on Good Things. Quoth Edinburgh City Council transport and environment convener, councillor Lesley Macinnes: ‘Any resulting income is reinvested in road maintenance and transport infrastructure across Edinburgh.’

That’d be the same transport infrastructure that includes the trams, a project that cost a whopping £776million, dug up half the city and is now the subject of a public inquiry?

No wonder the good people of Edinburgh don’t want to hand over their hard-earned cash to it.

Trying to park in this country’s cities these days is an exhausting, soulsapping experience, up there with undergoing root canal treatment or watching The One show. And – lucky us – transport bosses are trying to make it even harder.

Unless you are willing to pay a small fortune for the privilege of shoehorning your car into a space the size of a postage stamp in one of the privately run multi-storey car parks which are often full anyway, on-street parking is your only option.

The plain truth of the matter is that all this is part of a wider move to get cars out of city centres. Which is fine as far as it goes, if what you’re worried about is pollution and the environment. But for many people, it’s simply a non-starter.

But what about public transport, i hear Nicola sturgeon cry. Can’t you just hop on the bus? Oh, please.

Our government’s imagined fantasy of what public transport is like in this country is in stark contrast to the cold hard bus seat of reality.

But what can you expect when the First Minister can’t drive, and instead sees the world through the tinted windows of her ministerial limo?

Unless you have spent 45 minutes on a rail platform waiting for a train that never comes, been soaked to the skin in a taxi queue that never moves or searched endlessly for a bus stop that doesn’t exist, you have no idea of the exquisite pain involved in the simple phrase ‘i’ll just nip into town’. Our transport system just isn’t up to the job.

if we want our cities to flourish we need to give cars and the people travelling in them proper, affordable access.

Perhaps if we accepted that fact rather than fought it, we might – in both senses of the phrase – start getting somewhere.