St Albans, twinned with Aberystwyth (and Detroit)

The pleasant Welsh university town of Aberystwyth is ending a disastrous year-long experiment. In their wisdom, the town elders decided last year to fire all the traffic wardens, believing that decency and common sense would cause the citizenry to park responsibly and safely even without the threat of a ticket.  Bad call! With the wardens off the streets, the locals all turned into John Terry, parking wherever they liked and turning the town into a chaotic hell-hole. Now the wardens are coming back, to the relief of all concerned.

Here in equally pleasant St Albans, we could have saved them the trouble. A number of years ago, our parking wardens staged a long strike.  With the regulations unenforced, the result was mayhem, and there was great rejoicing (maybe I'm overstating the case a bit) when the tubby guys in blue were back on the prowl.

Not that the return of the wardens has put an end to all parking grievances in our fair city.  The big issue: people don't want to have to pay for the privilege of stashing a ton of metal by the side of the road.  Parking for free seems to be some kind of human right, which the local council messes with at its extreme peril.  One gent from a nearby village wrote indignantly to the local paper last month that the twice-weekly St Albans market was no longer on his must-do list, thanks to the parking charges.  The opportunity to take part in something that has been a tradition in the city for more than a thousand years, and to support local farmers and businessmen, is as naught compared to the outrageous imposition of having to pay a pound to park his precious steed.

Elsewhere in town, there is outrage at the local council's attempts to stop visitors to the ruins of Roman Verulamium and the (unruined) Abbey from parking on the grass verges in order to avoid parking charges.  One local councillor warned that the City could not afford to be seen as unfriendly to visitors, though it's not clear why we want to be friends with the kind of people who won't pay for parking:  those cheapskates probably bring their own sandwiches too.

It's not just in parking that St Albans leads the way.  Recently the once-great city of Detroit announced that it would be dousing a lot of its streetlights to save money.    Hey, Motown, get with the program!  Here in St A, the local council started doing that some time ago, and very well it's gone too.  The sensors initially installed on the lights -- all 40,000 of them across the county -- were faulty, and had to be replaced, and there were stories from all over the area of lights turning off mid-evening, and not at midnight as they were supposed to.   However, Detroit may avoid that fate, as it's going down a cheaper route -- almost half of the city's streetlights have failed anyway, and they're simply not being replaced.   Let's hope St Albans council doesn't get wind of that.