Advertiser columnist Ruth Wishart reflects on parking problems in Luss and elsewhere...

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If you can make a payment through gritted teeth I am about to do so: courtesy of the traffic warden who ticketed my car in Glasgow when I ran six minutes over the allotted time.

With a note of undisguised triumph she assured me only five minutes leeway was permitted.

I mention this small but costly inconvenience to remind those of us living in rural Scotland, that compared with city dwelling and working, our motoring hassles rarely include fines, circling the same blocks in the faint hopes of spaces appearing, or queuing at car park barriers praying someone plans to exit this side of Halloween.

Yet we have two set of local citizens currently on the march about parking concerns. One lot are from the ever popular tourist destination of Luss, the other is residents fretting over the increasing traffic round and about the new Co-op in Rosneath.

At the risk of getting run out of both villages could I gently suggest that these matching problems are largely the penalty of succeeding in managing to improve the local economy.

While it must be infuriating to serve as an involuntary extra in the filmic surroundings of Luss, the fact of its appeal keeps a lot of local concerns afloat – many of them assets to the local community as well as the visitors.

And the new and vastly improved Co-op facility in Rosneath not only provides a much wider range of produce for locals, but has been built on the site of what was a derelict building – both unsightly and on a notoriously dangerous corner.

So I guess I’d look on it as swings and roundabouts. Making Luss some kind of gated community with restricted entry just might prove counter productive, and, given that the Co-op has built a small car park at the rear of the store, it’s not easy to see what else can resolve the occasional congestion.