Sir – Yesterday my husband and I, for the second time since parking fees came into force, tried for the best part of 15 minutes to get a parking ticket from one of the two meters available for commuters at Water Eaton.

They can hardly be described as user-friendly since even the attendant, who finally came to help us, had to try three times to enter our car registration number. Two meters only seem extremely few, when the number of cars using the car park are considered. What sort of chaos must there be for the morning working commuters, we wondered?

As a result of the length of time it took to obtain our ticket, we missed our hospital bus and were obliged to wait a further 20 minutes for the next. We were only thankful that we did not miss an appointment.

It seems ridiculous to us to offer a derisory one-hour free parking there since it takes the best part of three-quarters-of-an-hour for the bus to get into Oxford and to make a return journey, leaving little time at all to carry out any activity in the town.

Two hours’ free parking would be far more satisfactory. The parking meters are complicated to use, have a very small glass screen which reflects the sunlight, resulting in difficulty in reading the instructions and the letters and figures are small and far too close together, making for frequent inaccurate input.

It must seem unnecessarily complicated to a foreigner trying to obtain a parking ticket. It certainly was for us anyway.

Surely a far simpler method of extracting still more revenue from the motoring public could have been devised, with many more meters around the car park, enabling a far quicker payment to be made.

Madeleine Gilpin (Mrs), Ardley-with-Fewcott