Intelligent Authority ?

The other day, for about ten minutes, I was a lawbreaker (but without being caught).

I am not really an anti-social sort of person, and I would normally be described as reasonably law-abiding, but I feel a great resentment when the law is used inappropriately or unnecessarily.

My undetected crime was that of parking outside the library while J popped in to change her audio-book. (I remained in the car)

Now of course it is necessary that the mobile library van can park there when it needs to (probably no more than a few minutes each day), but does that really mean that the same space cannot be used for any other purpose at any other time ?

When I thought about it, I realised that there are many other spaces that have similar restrictions for equally flimsy reasons, so I wonder why "those that know about such things" have never considered the obvious compromise.

My idea would be that instead of being labelled as "No Parking" such places should be marked in a way that allowed a vehicle to wait only if there was a driver in the vehicle, and then on condition that he/she would move their vehicle if the "official" user required it. In the case of the library, this would allow for what I was doing in any case, but would not cause any problems for the Mobile Library if it did turn up, and something similar applies at a number of other places in our town.

In fact the same principle would normally ensure that any parking was very short term, and that would perhaps be a useful option in all kinds of other situations too.

Are ideas like that a sign that I am some sort of genius ? Or is the lack of them a sign of utter incompetence on the part of those who impose an ever-increasing burden of restrictions on each of us ? Surely one or the other of those must be the case (and I am not quite arrogant enough to claim that it is the first ! )

More on this in a later post maybe