To the Editor,Re: Hospital parking fails patients in crisis situations, Letters, Feb. 8.Doris Lee’s observations are on the money, pure common sense. The only problem is common sense is dead. Parking lots used to have a barrier that raised when you took a ticket with time and date printed on it. On leaving, you paid for time parked. That was a good system without ripoff, but that makes too much sense.It required a live person to work in the checkout booth, but it cut out the virtues of ticketing parked cars.We have no idea how many government departments are farmed out – highways, ferries, hospitals, etc. It is easy for managers to contract out services, but they seem to ignore the fact that with little or no supervision, shoddy practices result. We don’t have to look far to find bad stories about government contractors. Big changes need to be made.In a true democracy, people empower the government. They do not belong to the government.Del YoungNanaimo
