Here’s a challenge for film buffs: can anyone remember, from the entire canon of cinema and television, a single scene set in an underground car park in which something unpleasant or nefarious did not occur? Yet I still rather like them. By far the best car park in London is the one found underneath Bloomsbury Square, which is in the shape of a double-helix. This allows you to drive all the way down and all the way up again with your steering wheel in one position.
About once a year I park in the Mayfair car park at the bottom of Park Lane. I recently noticed that an annual season ticket for the car park is £3,900, which, provided you are happy to sleep in your car and wash in the nearby public toilets, makes it something of a bargain for central London property. I recently paid a fairly hefty £22 to park for three hours. On the positive side, if you want to look at spectacularly expensive cars, the Mayfair car park is a cheap alternative to visiting the Motor Show, and also gives you the mild thrill of visiting what is, following the closure of the Razzle Multistorey in Bexleyheath, the only car park in London to be named after a pornographic -magazine.
But the other reason I don’t mind paying £22 to park for three hours is that this is something I only do once a year or so. If I had to do this twice a week, the cost would drive me practically insane.
In mathematics, xyz=zyx. This isn’t true in pricing. Asking 100 people to pay £10 once a year is not the same as making one person pay £10 100 times a year.
The Italians have ingeniously solved this problem.
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