Parking voucher nightmare

We all know the hassle of finding spare change for parking meters on busy city streets. Well, the council of the London borough of Richmond has a novel solution: parking vouchers. It's a fun way to pass a Friday afternoon in St Margarets, as I discovered recently.

Maximum stay 4 hours ... for 30 minutes. Eh?

Spot the parking voucher sign. Here's a clue: it's upside down.

See the parking voucher sign? Come on, the guy behind is hooting.

Instead of good old fashioned money, many of the parking spaces in Richmond require parking vouchers, paper slips that can only be purchased in particular neighbourhood shops. The shops, generally corner shops and newsagents, are helpfully designated by 'R' stickers in their windows.

Has anyone in Richmond council actually tried finding a shop that sells parking vouchers in busy traffic in an unfamiliar town? It's all very well if you're a resident (in which case you probably have a residents' parking permit anyway), but as a visitor you're not likely to have a bunch of Richmond-specific parking vouchers stashed in the glove box. We all like a bit of fun now and then, but I somehow doubt the councillors themselves are playing by the same rules.

Finding a parking space is a challenge in itself. Having found a space, the driver parks and deciphers the traditionally confusing roadside sign, only to find that their car is parked illegally and their carefully hoarded spare change is useless.

Instead they require an elusive permit which can only be purchased, mysteriously, from shops showing the all-important 'R' sign. There's no indication what kind of shops these might be, but one assumes they must be newsagents rather than, say, hair salons or Indian takeaways. At any rate it's back in the car in search of an 'R' sign, since there are no likely shops visible nearby.

To make the game more challenging, it turns out the 'R' signs are quite small. And as luck would have it, the windows of the local corner shops that sell them are invariably covered in a hundred other brightly coloured signs, advertisements and notices, making it almost impossible to identify the target sign from a moving car. Well, you wouldn't want it to be too easy, would you?

Brilliantly, having finally spotted a shop showing the sign, the driver then needs to park to go inside and buy a voucher ...