Parking charge woes ...

No council ever made friends with the public by charging them more for a service!

So the powers that be at Sunderland City Council need to don their hard hats after putting parking charges up by 10p an hour.

Within minutes of the story being made public, the keyboard warriors went to town on council officers.

Some of their criticism had merit.

How can they attract more people into the city centre if they are going to charge them more for the privilege?

And is putting up prices really the best way to compete with out of town shopping centres like the MetroCentre where parking is free?

The public will take some convincing on that score.

We even had people online complaining about the state of some of the car parks in our city.

Of course, if the council are to improve the car parks, they need money to do this.

In some respects, however, the council has started to make parking work for the benefit of the city.

Prior to last year, the council’s car parking policy ended up costing the council money.

In a period of four years they lost a total of £1,236,000.

Last year, however, they managed to turn things round, raking in a healthy £437,000 surplus.

The council knows they find themselves caught between a rock and hard place.

Make money and they are branded greedy, lose money and they are accused of mismanagement.

It’s a difficult balancing act to perform, but if they are to curry favour with the public they serve, a clearer picture of the benefits needs to be painted.