Editorial: ​Parking Ulster’s community spirit for a small profit

​Northern Ireland’s people have always prided themselves on the community spirit that exists in our towns and villages.

It’s a sense of neighborliness that existed through the toughest of times.

People here always seem to be willing to go out of their way to give others a helping hand.

It manifests itself at times of trauma and death - the rallying around to help and comfort the suffering but it also appears in some strange places.

And perhaps one of the most unlikely places is car parks.

Almost every driver in the Province will have seen ticket machines covered in the familiar parking stickers with an hour or two left to run - stuck there by well-meaning shoppers or motorists who have left before their time is up.

Drivers leaving a car park will also roll their window down and hand across their ticket to someone coming in.

It’s a small gesture of goodwill but it would seem that it is coming to an end.

New ticket machines which require the number plate of a car to be entered, and thus making the ticket non-transferable, are spreading across Northern Ireland.

Newry looks set to be the latest town to get them and, as the News Letter reports on page 16 today, the council report on the matter describes the new machines as an attempt to put a stop to the “costly practice of ticket transfer between vehicles”.

But is it really that costly and is it even a proper ​If someone buys a ticket the cinema or theatre surely that person has the right to decide who sits in that seat.

And if the same person decides to leave before the end of the show the cinema obviously couldn’t sell their seat over again.

But that is surely a similar situation to that of the car park charges.

The person that pays for the right to park their car there for a period of time should surely have the right to transfer that space to someone else.

No-one is out of pocket in that situation.