Spare a thought for Dundee’s put upon traffic wardens.
Their jobs can’t be much fun at the best of times but, at a stroke, their bosses at Dundee City Council have made their lives immeasurably worse.
They’ll now be expected to work at nights where they will face householders extremely aggrieved to be ticketed outside their homes.
The decision to start having wardens out issuing tickets at night has, unsurprisingly, gone down as well as a cup of cold sick with many residents.
Across Dundee there are simply too many cars and too few parking spaces.
It’s meant that for decades, residents have been forced to leave their cars on double yellow lines near their homes when no other spaces are available.
Not exactly legal, but not particularly harmful or hazardous either.
Now, however, people living in areas where parking is limited face having to park several streets away from their homes if no spaces are available nearby.
That’s fine on a pleasant summer’s evening but a stroll home will be less enjoyable in a winter hailstorm when laden with shopping, children or some combination thereof.
The counter argument is a simple one: rules is rules.
Break the law and you can expect to pay the penalty. Dundee City Council’s decision to start enforcing rrestrictions it has previously ignored might be a pain in the posterior but it is justifiable on those terms.
Or it would be if it wasn’t likely to hit motorists in areas where valuable parking spots have been taken up by the unpopular Eurobins.
Motorists will feel they have been targeted twice over by the local authority.
Little wonder then that the reaction to last Friday’s announcement about wardens patrolling at night has provoked outrage online.
Liberal Democrat councillor Fraser Macpherson defended the move by claiming it is a response to complaints about illegal parking in some parts of Dundee.
But given the soaring amount of money the council has been raking in through parking fines in recent years, the perception in many quarters will be that it is nothing more than a cash grab.
And in politics, perception is everything.
