I HAVE discovered a way to get rich quick. I’m going to buy a bit of wasteland and turn it into a car park.

I won’t bother to waste money on making sure it’s flat, properly tarmacked or marked out into parking bays. As long as cars can drive on to it without breaking themselves, that’s enough - have a look at some of the car parks in York.

Once the cars are in, I’ll charge their drivers as extortionate a fee as I can possibly get away with. No, I’ll be kind, I’ll undercut most car parks in the city centre and only charge them £2 an hour; they can’t complain about that.

So, suppose I have on average just ten cars each hour, and it’s open for office hours only, 8am to 6pm, Mondays to Fridays, that’s £200 a day, £1,000 a week, £52,000 a year, with no outgoings for heating or electricity etc apart from the ticket machines.

I’ll have to pay for someone to clamp those that don’t pay, but if I have more than one bit of wasteland I can share the cost between them. I’ll be raking it in.

That calculation gives some idea of just how lucrative the car park business can be. As every city centre shopkeeper and business knows because they lose uncounted number of customers to it, the standard charge for city centre car parks is more than £2 a hour. I dread to think how much the multi-storey car parks bring in for their owners.

Cars are a captive market. Until someone invents a means of parking in mid-air, they have to park somewhere and the car park owners make the most of that. When spending cuts began to bite, local authorities and hospitals worked out very quickly that cars are an easy source of revenue and have been ramping up the car parking fees every year ever since. As for airport car parks, heaven help you once they get your claws into you. They cynically fleece drivers of every pound possible, knowing that in some cases there is only limited public transport available. Try getting to Leeds Bradford Airport by train.

You can pay more for the privilege of leaving your car at the airport than you do for the plane journey and it gets worse if you are picking someone up.

Stansted Airport used to have a 15-minute free facility in its short-stay car park, after which the price went up astronomically in 15-minute chunks. You had to pay in a pay parking machine when you were ready to go and when I went, half the machines were broken, which meant that I spent 30 minutes in the queue to pay, watching the cost go up and up.

Then this summer Luton Airport decided to change its useful hour-long drop off facility in its mid-stay car park, ten minutes from the terminal. Only after I had turned into the car park did I realise it now only gives you 15 minutes free.

It gives you 45 minutes more at a mildly extortionate rate, after which it goes up to the daily rate at £27. Since I took 61 minutes including the double bus trip to the terminal which was done at crawling speed because the bus had to go through the permanent big traffic jam at the terminal’s entrance, I had to pay the daily rate. I was furious.

But that pales into insignificance compared to what was done to a colleague of mine who exceeded his parking time in a York car park by five minutes because he went to a busy venue and had to queue to get out of the door. He was handed a £100 car parking fine. No wonder there are so many cars trying to squeeze themselves next to bits of kerb which don’t have yellow lines but where it really isn’t a good idea to leave a car. No wonder there are so many cases of people misusing blue badges. They are objecting to being exploited by money-grabbing organisations of any kind.

Car park owners are holding motorists to ransom. It is capitalism and customer exploitation at its very worst.

It’s time for the Government to set a maximum car parking charge by law. Then people might actually want to use car parks and we may have far fewer cars parked in inconvenient places or misusing blue badges.