davekeiller wrote:There's some truth in what you say.
However, I think a large part of the objection is the fact that car parks which were previously free have suddenly started charging, with no obvious justification in the form of spending on facilities. In other cases, car parks where a relatively low fee was charged have raised the fee significantly, again with little obvious justification beyond the fact that the car park is popular enough that it will be essentially full all day regardless of the charges.
In case I have come across as a anti-car extremist, I will say that I do see and understand the objection to paying parking fees that go up and up and up, especially if there is no visible way those fees get reinvested for the common good, so it looks like money grabbing greed. I think some places are a victim of their own success, and if they get rammed full, charging for their use (through parking) is a kind of default tool to suppress demand for a supply that has been exhausted. It is unfortunate, but is a consequence of our locally rammed full areas. You can't really blame the other people as they all have the same idea as you or I.
Living in Sussex I have watched my home town get busier and busier over the 20 years I have lived here, as developers keep snapping up plots of land and building houses that are priced well out of range of all but the wealthiest first time buyers, yet generally the town facilities and services have not grown with the population, so it sometimes feels like everyone is in everyone elses way, you have to queue for almost everything, and I have to use my gym late evening because the free weights area is often rammed full during the day. I have to book in advance to dispose of waste at the local tip/recycling centre instead of just turning up when I liked, because the queues became horrendous (I waited two hours once), and were backing out onto the main road causing a hazard for motorists.
The thing with the Scottish Highlands is that its beauty and history have been heavily advertised for as long as I can remember, and the road network and public transport has always been limited, so what does anyone expect other than the tourist population to go up and up and up every year, eventually meaning the local services and ionfrastructure can't cope with it properly? It does seem odd in a way to encourage people to visit the highlands, then throw high parking fees at them when they do visit because there are too many of them.