The attendant said nothing at all. He didn't look up. He pretended I wasn't there.	It is with much trepidation that I relay the following story, in the hope that it is more suggestive than just another party parking anecdote. One morning last week, I left my car on a yellow line on the street near my flat. Returning three minutes later, I found a parking attendant getting ready to issue a ticket. What followed was surreal. I did the usual futile routine - oops, so sorry, ha ha, is it okay if I move it right now? etc. Everyone tries this, and it never works; the attendant always says you're too late, and carries on with the ticket. On this occasion, the attendant said nothing at all. He didn't look up. He pretended I wasn't there. He carried on processing the ticket. It was as though he were deaf and dumb, a piece of pre-programmed robotic machinery. Printing out a ticket takes maybe four or five minutes. During that time, we stood a few feet away from each other, and I asked him questions. Could he hear me? Did he know I was there? Would he look at me? Was he going to talk to me? Was he going to say anything at all? Passers-by stopped and stared at the spectacle of two people standing next to each other, both involved in the same exchange, and one of them refusing to acknowledge that the other one was there. The attendant placed the ticket on the windscreen, turned and walked off, stare still fixed at a 90-degree angle. There is a standard case for arguing that parking control has gone mad. People complain that armies of commission-hungry attendants are scouring the streets, backed up by private companies who employ thugs to tow away your car for an extortionate fee. You hear about thoroughly unpleasant scenes at car pounds, and the angry opinion say they should be abolished. It's a familiar complaint, and understandable enough, but not very sound. Parking control is a perfectly legitimate exercise, and if all the traffic wardens and clampers were made redundant tomorrow, London would grind to a halt. You don't get towed away unless you park illegally, and I wouldn't have got a ticket if I hadn't parked on a yellow line. It was entirely reasonable, if annoying, for the attendant to give me a ticket. That isn't the point.
	A local authority trains its staff to blank the people who elected it, and regards this as good practice.	Alternativelty, there are those who look at the pressure on parking in cities and conclude that this is the inevitable consequence of a car culture. If public transport is useless, cars are fetishised, and company cars are society's semi-tax-free trophies, of course we will encounter problems over where to put them all. There is some obvious truth in this, but that is also another argument. The profoundly depressing point about last week's encounter with the attendant was not that I will have to pay a fine, which is normal enough, but that he would not even register that anyone else was there, which I do not think should be normal at all. It wasn't an aggressive encounter - I was too stunned to raise my voice - and it was only a parking ticket. It would be preferable if he issued 10 tickets at a go, and said something in the process, than had been reduced to the role of wordless automaton. It was an alienated, dehumanised exchange. You would hope that this was the behaviour of one demoralised attendant who is sick of his job. It turns out that Camden Council, his employer, actually trains its parking attendants to act as if the public do not exist. Apparently, this is the approved strategy to prevent their staff being assaulted. So a local authority trains its staff to blank the people who elected it, and regards this as good practice. A colleague recently witnessed a doctor jump from his car and rush into a house, clearly on an emergency call. So did a parking attendant, and she crossed the street to issue a ticket. My colleague pointed out that this was a doctor on call. She ignored him. Only when he tried to put money in the meter himself was she induced to talk to him, and she told him to mind his "own effing business". The mistake is to think about these tiny incidents in terms of parking control. Parking is just a banal fact of life, but when people in cities are reduced to behaving like this, it is neither banal nor a necessarily inevitable fact of life. Each time we strip away another layer of social lubricant, removing human beings from innocuous everyday interactions, we undo the basic norms necessary for large numbers of people to live together in the same small spaces. It may seem more "efficient" to do so, because human contact is messy and unpredictable and difficult to control, but it is also deeply damaging.
	Each time we strip away another layer of social lubricant, we undo the norms necessary for large numbers of people to live in the same small spaces.	Society is engaged in an endless debate about why it is that we seem to be getting less civilised. Where did road rage come from? How come teenagers are abusive? How come patients attack nurses? Why are assaults on police going up? There are an infinite number of answers, and how one council trains its parking attendants is only a tiny fraction of one. But as an example of the way in which our response to the problem only serves to compound it, it is instructive. It does not take a behavioural psychologist to point out that if people are treated by authority as if they do not exist, they are likely to react badly. The danger of becoming a parking bore in London is more worrying than the odd parking ticket. On reflection, however, the danger of regarding as normal the training of parking attendants is much worse. Urban life is cramped - that's the whole point of it - and habits are contagious. What is offensive in Camden soon becomes unremarkable in Cardiff, and we will be left lamenting another bit of common civility, and wondering how it happened.