Sick of being a four-wheeled cash cow? It was ever thus

EMISSIONS: The past offers little comfort in the search for parking solutions

THE TALE of territoriality I recounted here last week has left me pondering deeply on life and the pernicious influence of the car. I suspect that, rather than bringing us together, cars are driving us apart. Depressing, isn’t it?

Parking, like everything else in this money-obsessed country, has become commodified. The resultant stress is everywhere to be seen. Skirmishes and squabbles over spaces are breaking out daily in streets, shopping centres, housing estates and train stations.

Meanwhile, clampers – bless their little black souls – are hunting in packs, immobilising or towing away everything in sight, piling on the misery.

There is a hyper-zealous traffic warden I know of who is the perfect example of this battle for dominion over parking spaces. Taking his job far, far too seriously, he struts about like an odious little princeling in his cheap uniform and ridiculous cap, exhibiting all the compassion of Pol Pot.

There are chaps like this vulture in serge slacks in every town and village in the land, whose sneaky, merciless antics are driving motorists nuts, leaving them seething with resentment at being seen as four-wheeled cash cows.

Their behaviour, sanctioned as it is by local authorities, begs the question: does alienating regular folk trying to go about their business without being subjected to petty vindictiveness constitute a public service? Or is it merely pushing the disgruntled masses closer to anarchy?

In search of an answer, I have been spending an inordinate amount of time this week perusing the archive of The Irish Times, having convinced myself that solutions to our current parking problems may be found by harking back to past eras. The archive is a mine of fascinating, if disheartening, information.

I say disheartening because the evidence suggests, sadly, that parking always was – and probably always will be – an unending battle between us and the powers that be.

Eighty years ago, Irish motoring was still in its infancy. One could drive from Dublin to Cork and barely encounter a dozen fellow thrill-seeking motorists along the whole route. But even with such a dearth of cars, parking was a cause of much consternation and conflict.

In October 1929, Dublin was treated to the establishment of the Corps of Motor Park Commissioners, a grand title for what sounds like a racket for lock-hard men. It was ostensibly set up because Dublin’s 42 licenced parking attendants received “scant courtesy and no money from some of the people who use parking spaces”. My heart bleeds for them.

The corps offered tags to the 2,500 motorists who parked in the city each day at the not insubstantial sum of five shillings per month. These not only entitled the holder to use any of the 21 recognised parking spaces across the city centre, but also acted as an insurance policy “against theft of any articles which he may leave in the car, and to which he draws the attention of the attendant”. Any losses to aforementioned articles were to “be made good out of the general funds of the corps”.

This, to a cynic such as I, appears on the surface to be a form of legalised extortion, carrying as it does the implicit threat that not coughing up for the tag would result in parking attendants gleefully – and, in their own minds, justifiably – helping themselves to your valuables as remuneration instead.

The system was suspended shortly afterwards, with management citing “reorganisation” for the interruption. Despite the corps insisting it had received no complaints from the public, its reintroduction several months later was accompanied by an earnest pledge to exercise “a more strict discipline over members”.