Samantha Moore may seem jolly, perched among the jars of fudge and flying saucers at her sweet shop on Fore Street in Brixham, the picturesque Devon fishing town. But there’s one subject sure to sour her mood: parking. Moore and her family live above the shop and pay Torbay district council £50 a year for an off-peak permit, which allows them to leave their Peugeot hatchback in the nearby town-centre car park between 3pm and 10am.

That’s convenient from Monday to Friday, when Moore’s husband takes the car to work. At weekends, she says, “Parking is a nightmare. On Saturday mornings, we have to put the car anywhere we can find a free space in Brixham.” That means leaving it on residential streets. “And then the residents feel we’re taking their parking spaces. We’ve had dog turds smeared on our windows, rude notes left under the wipers, damage done to the car.”

Parking also impacts on Moore’s business. In January, she closed her luxury soap shop, which catered to tourists, and opened Sweet Treats in hopes of attracting more local custom. Yet, after raising the cost of parking to 50p for 30 minutes last year, the council recently doubled it to £1. “It’s not the holidaymakers we need to worry about, it’s the locals,” Moore says. “The minute parking charges go up, they just won’t come into town – and trade drops off.”

Along the coast in Totnes, the tourists have noticed, too. The Totnes Times recently devoted its front page to a letter from Mark Lee of Bradford on Avon, who professed himself “shocked and disappointed” by the lack of free on-road parking anywhere in the outwardly charming market town. “Totnes well and truly takes the biscuit as the most visitor-unfriendly town or city we have probably ever visited,” Lee wrote.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘It’s not the holidaymakers we need to worry about, it’s the locals’ ... Brixham sweet shop owner Samantha Moore. Photograph: Mark Passmore/Apex

South Devon is the site of several such skirmishes in the endless war over parking space, a topic that inspires angry letters to local newspapers up and down the land. Meter charges are as fraught an issue as bin collections or the price of a pint of milk. Simon Lee, a DJ with the local radio station Torbay Sound, recently launched a Change.org petition to protest against the district’s latest parking rate hikes. It has attracted more than 700 signatures.

There are just three free parking spots left in the whole of Torquay town centre, says Lee, a second world war history buff who drives a Vauxhall Astra. “Torbay council used to offer £2 all-day parking through the winter, which was great for locals. But they put it up to £10 overnight. That was the ‘yikes’ moment that made me start the petition. I expect it will fall on deaf ears, but I wanted to get a rant out there and see who else felt the same.”

Britain is home to more than 30m cars, which on average spend 95% of their time parked. In London, minimum parking requirements for new properties were abolished in 2004; according to the Economist, the average parking provision in new residential blocks soon fell from 1.1 spaces per flat to 0.6, putting street parking space at an even greater premium.

As anyone who has had a prang in the supermarket car park knows, parking spaces have remained roughly the same size for decades, despite our cars expanding: the VW Golf, for instance, has grown 55cm longer and 19cm wider since the 1970s. Meanwhile, the way we pay for those spaces has long been “stuck in the 1930s”, says Donald Shoup, a professor of urban planning at UCLA. “That’s when the parking meter was invented, and for most people it hasn’t changed: you put your money in the meter and hope to come back before your time runs out. What other industry has changed so little in 80 years?”

What has changed, of course, is the price of a space. Research conducted by the RAC Foundation suggests parking fees and fines produced a collective surplus of £756m last year for 353 local councils in England. That’s a 34% increase since 2011, leading some to suspect that, in straitened times, councils are using drivers as a cash cow.

“No one wants a parking free-for-all,” says RAC Foundation spokesman Philip Gomm. “But with English councils annually making north of three-quarters-of-a-billion pounds between them, it is right to ask whether this has become less about managing congestion – the sole legal justification for setting on-street charges – and more about shoring up declining budgets.”

Terry Falcão, the outgoing mayor of Teignmouth, spent three months of his year-long tenure preparing a paper on parking to submit to Devon county council, which oversees the town’s on-street parking. The council took up his recommendations for a residents’ parking scheme, but he says they also added meters to a stretch of the seafront without consulting him. “Motorists are perceived as an easy target to raise revenue,” says Falcão, who vacated the mayoralty in May, and so can no longer park his Renault Clio in the mayor’s reserved spot.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Motorists are perceived as an easy target to raise revenue’ ... photograph: Mark Passmore/Apex

Peering to read the small print on the meter at the Eastcliffe car park in Teignmouth, coach driver Phil Parfett complains that councils raise parking charges in towns, “and then they wonder why everyone goes to the out-of-town Tesco”. Parfett has been driving coaches for 35 years and frequently works on the continent. Seaside towns in France and Spain always offer free coach parking, he claims, adding: “Britain is the worst place to park in the world.”

Devon county council did not respond to a request for comment, while Torbay council said its parking rates were set following a year-long review, which took on board the views of residents. As Cllr Martin Tett, a spokesman for the Local Government Association, points out, “Where they do make any surpluses from on-street parking, [councils] are required to spend it on improving parking and transport facilities.”

English councils reportedly spent £4.3bn on transport-related services in 2015-16, of which the £756m surplus from parking charges accounted for just 17%. Brighton and Hove made more in surplus parking fees than any other council outside London but, according to the city’s annual parking report, almost all that money was spent on providing 46,000 free bus passes for older and disabled people.

In Nottingham, the city council places a “workplace parking levy” on businesses that offer parking space to their employees, to both fund and encourage the use of public transport. Introduced in 2012, the levy – the only scheme of its kind in the country – raised almost £35m over four years to pay for trams, buses and the redevelopment of Nottingham rail station.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Torbay Sound DJ Simon Lee launched a petition protesting against the district’s parking rate hike. Photograph: Mark Passmore/Apex

At least 50 local councils make no money whatsoever from parking – or even make a loss – to keep their town centres busy and support high street retailers. Councils aren’t the only parking providers, though. The RAC Foundation also says private parking firms requested more than 4.7m vehicle-keeper records from the DVLA in 2016-17, a year-on-year increase of 28%. Most of those requests were probably made for the purpose of issuing fines to drivers.

The management of private car parks naturally has an impact on parking space elsewhere, says Gomm. “When pricing is introduced in one location it creates a ripple effect and problems, literally, further down the road. Ask anyone who lives near a railway station or sports ground or hospital and they will tell you tales of visiting drivers clogging the roads in search of a cheaper or free option.”

In April, the public service union Unison released a report on the extortionate amounts some hospital staff are being forced to pay for parking at their own places of work. Among the most expensive were the Royal Free Hospital car park in north London, at £85.38 a month per space, and a Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen University Hospitals Trust car park, at £79.50 a month. Hospital car-parking fees were abolished across Scotland and Wales in 2008, and Jeremy Corbyn has said a Labour government would do the same for England.

Hospitals aside, however, free parking is not an unalloyed good, says Shoup, a world authority on the economics of parking. Rather, space is a commodity – in some areas, a very valuable one – and people ought to pay market value to use it. “Some cities have agreed on a formula for the price of parking: it’s the lowest price the city can charge and still have one or two open spaces on every block.

“If the price is too low, there won’t be any spaces and drivers will keep cruising around, polluting the air, congesting traffic, interfering with pedestrians and cyclists. If the price is too high, too many spaces are vacant, stores lose customers and the space is wasted.” Arriving at the appropriate price point is a process of “trial and error”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Britain is home to more than 30m cars, which on average spend 95% of their time parked. Photograph: georgeclerk/Getty Images/iStockphoto

In London, Shoup suggests the balance of charges between residents and visitors may be out of whack. Kensington and Chelsea, for instance, made a £34.2m surplus from parking charges and fines last year, but while visitors to the wealthy borough pay up to £4.60 an hour for a space, residents can get an annual permit for as little as £80, and a maximum of £219. (In Torbay, a full annual parking permit costs £365.)

“When you walk around Kensington and Chelsea, you see a lot of Bentleys at the kerb, so you’re giving a huge benefit to a very small number of people who are much richer than the average,” says Shoup. “Land in London is some of the most expensive on the planet. Why should people pay so much for housing and cars pay so little? We’re losing a lot of potential revenue – which could be spent on extra public services – to provide a parking subsidy.”

Technology, automation and big data may soon make parking and parking management less painful. Already, most UK councils have introduced cashless parking: rather than insert cash into a meter, drivers type their car’s registration number and a parking location code into an app. The UK’s largest cashless parking service, RingGo, purports to process more than 2 million parking sessions every month, and has been used by more than 6 million individual motorists.

The problem with this system is that drivers have to keep downloading new apps depending on where they park. London boroughs use several different apps, including RingGo, ParkMobile and PayByPhone. Teignmouth car parks (run by the Teignbridge district council) use RingGo, but the town’s on-street parking meters (Devon county council) use PhoneAndPay. In Torquay (Torbay district council), it’s ParkMobile.

At least one app is trying to reduce the confusion: AppyParking was launched in 2013 as a parking information service, to let drivers know where to find a space and how much it would cost. Now, it acts as a single payment portal to several apps, such as RingGo and PayByPhone, which between them control some 85% of the country’s cashless parking locations.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘There’s more cars on the road all the time, and the council gives you less and less places to park.’ ... Photograph: kucele/Getty Images/iStockphoto

Last year, AppyParking trialled a new parking payment system in partnership with the borough of Westminster – which, with a 2015-16 surplus of £55.9m, boasts the most valuable parking stock in the UK. The new system uses “connected car payments”, explains AppyParking founder Dan Hubert: “Cars can pay for a parking session with the click of a button. The car is the sensor. When it drives out of the bay, you’re charged only for the seconds you stayed.”

The trial was conducted with vans used by the plumbing firm Pimlico Plumbers, which claimed it had saved more than £100,000 in parking fines over the year and reduced the average time to find a space from 20 minutes to 30 seconds. The ultimate goal is for cars to inform their drivers whether they can park in a certain spot, and to then automatically pay for the spot until the driver returns. “We want to make parking forgettable,” says Hubert.

In April 2016, BMW bought ParkMobile, the Dutch cashless parking provider, which is also RingGo’s parent company. This January, PayByPhone was acquired by Volkswagen, which already controls 92% of Germany’s biggest cashless parking provider. It’s a natural move for car manufacturers, which, says Hubert, “don’t see themselves simply as car manufacturers any more; they see themselves as ‘mobility solutions technology companies’”.

Perhaps carmakers are simply insuring themselves against the possibility of a decline in car ownership. In cities, at least, ride-sharing services such as Uber and car clubs such as ZipCar and DriveNow are making it increasingly impractical to pay for the upkeep – let alone the parking costs – of one’s own vehicle.

The logical next step is the self-driving car, which could render parking obsolete. Everyone from Uber to Google and Tesla to BMW is working to build an autonomous vehicle for the masses. As and when they do, that vehicle will be able to drop off and pick up its owner wherever they choose. So why would it ever need to park?

Back in Brixham, the distant prospect of driverless cars does nothing to address the issue at the kerbside. In the Rio Fish Restaurant on Pump Street, proprietor Steve Lee breaks off from battering cod. “There’s more cars on the road all the time, and the council gives you less and less places to park,” he says. “The prices are horrendous. The skinter local governments get, the more of a mess of things politicians make, it’s us law-abiding citizens who get shafted.”

To Lee’s mind, it’s just another sign that Britain is going to the dogs – which is why he and his wife intend to sell up and emigrate. “We’re done,” he says. “We’re going to Ibiza.”