Pragmatically, you are absolutely right. But morally I'm with Ziggy on this one.Burnaby49 wrote:Perhaps they deserve some sympathy for not getting enough free parking but, as she found out, not paying in a pay lot isn't the answer. What did she expect a private pay lot to do? Be sympathetic and ignore her? .
The hospital had a large shared car park. They were already making useful side money on a generic pay-and-display system, but they wanted more. So they partitioned an inadequate section for staff parking, and hired Indigo Parking Services to screw every last penny from the rest of the land. This of course is by charging inflated fees to patients and families who are visiting the hospital, and have little choice but to pay.
The dead-eyed sharks who negotiated this deal knew that there would be periods of overflow in the staff area, perhaps even intended it. But the staff would only realise this when they arrived 10 mins before their shift started, so they wouldn't have time to go looking for other options. The plan was that they would have to park in the public area and pay the public rate. And this would generate another little bag of unearned profit for the rentiers.
What the staff have tried to do here is to shame the hospital into renegotiating the partition, lose some profit by allocating a few hundred more spaces for staff so that peak periods were manageable. But they underestimated the contempt which modern NHS managers have for frontline staff (and patients). These people are impervious to shame, compassion or integrity.
