Question Author
Thank you. I am sure I am not the only person who thinks the 24 000 wardens would be much better occupied looking for car vandals, car thieves, hit and run criminals, roadside muggers, assisting the young, the elderly and decrepit at dangerous junctions and apprehending transport related miscreants.
Placing tickets on cars and organising clamping and towing away simply creates problems not the least being the alienation of law abiding citizens (particularly foreigners who have great difficulty in understanding the plethora of different signage), enormous wastage of bureuacratic time and all at great cost to the tax payer who is of course the immediate target of all these restrictive practices.
Undoubtedly traffic wardens and what they do brings in revenue. May I suggest that there are many other more user-friendly ways of collecting money and at the same time maintaining the quality of life that punitive parking restrictions and over zealous wardening clearly do not.
In th part of London where I live we have recently had four different kinds of parking restriction, several new solar powered ticket vending machines and a mass of tow away trucks and intimidatory unfiformed wardens now disturbing a place where we had no parking problems and no intrusion of unsightly and fundamentally unhelpful parking infrastructure and restrictions. What is the cost and benefit to our society?