Consuming Interest
Meterology
Elisabeth Dunn
Just up the road from these very offices, London's traffic wardens learn the tricks of their highly specialised trade. Their training includes a course on first aid. Students of traffic warden behaviour may observe the fresh-faced recruits in the area, still on duty at 6.20 in the evening, learning how to affix that ticket to the windscreen of an offending vehicle just as its owner returns. That, no
doubt, is when their skill with the first aid kit is-tested.
Though London's motorists might not agree, Scotland Yard holds that the capital is woefully short on traffic wardens. Ideally there should be 3,000 of them; in reality there are only 1,850 and the Home Office has issued a directive restricting the recruitment of any more. Nevertheless, a uniformed lady still leers from advertising cards in the Tube over a caption reading: 'I couldn't wish for a better job.'
This is to compensate for 'wastage'. There was a lot of wastage about in 1974 when a pay award boosted the starting wages to £44.66 a week. And that, your bile-filled motorist would say, just goes to show that every man has got his price and a traffic warden's price is not very high. Considering.
Considering that the job enjoys a social esteem quotient which puts it slightly higher than a Department of Social Security snooper but appreciably lower than a rodent operative. Radio One disc jockeys do not, after all, broadcast gleeful quips about a rodent operative being run over, followed by the sad news that he is not seriously injured. Jokes in poor taste are reserved exclusively for traffic wardens.
They provoke an almost reflex hostility. Even on point duty, for which they have the same training as policemen, they don't somehow inspire the same confidence as a fullyfledged law enforcement officer. And one would never dream of asking them the time.
Nor are they cheap. The total cost of patrolling the yellow lines, meters and residents' parking areas in the metropolis is on the £4i million mark. That includes the uniform, training and, appropriately enough, a cycle allowance.
If a parking warden's job satisfaction can be measured in the number of fixed penalty notices scored per week, it is small wonder that the brows under the yellow-banded caps are a little clouded these days. Since the introduction last September of the £6 fine, the number of tickets (fixed penalties, that is) has dropped from around 8,000 per week to 5,500. Even so the Treasury collects more than double the revenue it used to.
Motorists are funny about their cars. They call them 'she' and devote their Sundays to her. And to them, the traffic warden (who, out of uniform, may be a perfectly normal driver) is as gamekeeper to poacher.
The warden is there to be outwitted, mocked, and maybe, in the end, abolished. For the abolition of parking wardens, together with pollution and traffic congestion, is one of the weightiest arguments for banning the private car completely from the centre of the city, though such a move would be unthinkable so long as the number 73 bus arrives in groups of four at half-hourly intervals. Meanwhile, inhaling carbon monoxide fumes and sitting out the Euston Road traffic jam are as nothing beside the problems which face the driver who wants to get out of his car.
Most central London car parks now charge their customers some £1.60 to leave
the car for the day. The rates are skilfullY juggled to keep them just ahead of parking meter charges—or they have been in the past. There is mouth-drying talk of £3-a-daY parking in garages—a rate which would be just cheaper than that now charged by the City of London for some of its parking bays. In the environs of Fleet Street, for instance, some meters have been adjusted to give fifteen minutes for 10p. Therefore, if you moved your car from meter to meter all day, you would find you had paid £3.20 by the evening.
And thereby buzzes another bee in the London motorist's bonnet. You never know what kind of change will satisfy the meter's insatiable appetite. In Pall Mall there are meters which still take sixpences. Most will take shillings and, indeed, the canny motorist has grown accustomed to leaving a small pile of shillings in his glove compartment, a sort of meter bank. This can now prove a positive disservice. The City of Westminster, which works out parking rates on the Mon' opoly board principle of the better the address, the higher the price, has meters In Mayfair which will only register 10p pieces. Offer them a shilling and they accept it with alacrity but don't give you any time in exchange. A spiffing wheeze, that one. It helps to make some £1,300,000 in a year for West' minster City Council—a figure which in" eludes the excess charge made to drivers wb0 go over the time limit. What the motorist Is getting in return is 5,000 fewer meter bays tri which to park. The London Borough of Camden has de; vised an even more ingenious method el' keeping the motorist in his place—or at least, out of theirs. It has turned over long rows of meters to residents' parking spaces in streets almost wholly occupied by offices. The success of this device is plainly evident. The residents' parking spaces are practical deserted for the greater part of the day. The message is clear enough. The motor car is not welcome in central London. Tb.! trouble with this particular message is that it is not very well phrased, for its effect is that the self-driven family saloon dare hardlY rest a wheel against the kerb while the chauffeur-driven limousine has the run of the road; parks in bus lanes if it likes. If driving is becoming a rich man's pastime, stoPPIng driving is the preserve of millionaires. There is a solution for non-millionaires. It is a Very Small Car. It is usually quite easY to find a meter occupied in part by a mediunir sized car. Once found, the Very Small Ca driver skilfully and parasitically manoeuvre!, his motor into that part of the parking bt unfilled by the host car. (Incidentally, V,euo, Small Car drivers benefit especially in Ishii,' ton where the council has blocked off so; streets with posts across the road. In a Ve") Small Car, you can drive between the If every motorist in the capital took up ing Very Small Cars, we could effective'r; double the number of parking spaces Ovens night and throw the GLC's repressive Pla into total confusion.
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