EVERY one of us has experienced it. Or, at any rate, every driver has. At the pay-and-display car park, the ticket machine demands, say, £2.80 for three hours. You lack the correct loose change. If you’re lucky the next customer is able to help. More likely, you pay £3.

Infuriating. But take heart. By 2020 such involuntary overpayments will be history. All vending machines will be designed to accept tap-and-go payment, made through contactless cards, which will be universal by 2020. At the car park, you’d simply select your time, slide the card over the screen, and, hey presto, job done.

Good news – a minor piece of stress taken out of modern life? Certainly the latter. But the former? Make up your mind. For the compulsory switch to tap-and-go machines is an order from the EU, which has set the 2020 deadline for the change to be complete.

As with the EU safety standards for oven gloves, which I highlighted last week, here is another example of the all-pervasive influence of the EU, very often on matters that appear to have no EU-wide relevance. Why should whether we want safer oven gloves, or a fairer and easier method of making parking charges be up to anyone except ourselves?

It’s perhaps worth harking back to the mid 1970s. In 1974, Britain’s General Election was fought around the question Who Governs Britain? Battling the coal miners, the Tory Prime Minister, Ted Heath, posed the question to challenge Labour, led by Harold Wilson. Wilson won, but when he launched the referendum on our “Common Market” membership in 1975, there was no thought that this was really another, even bigger, Who Governs Britain question.

Now, everyone knows better. As we approach the referendum on EU membership, the various ‘leave’ factions could do worse than take up Who Governs Britain as their battle cry.

MAYBE I’m missing something. In Yorkshire at the moment there surely can be no greater coup for any town or village than to have been selected to be on the route of the upcoming Tour de Yorkshire. Most would call the race’s visit a memorable event.

So why are numerous places favoured by the race seeking to add, symbolically, bells and whistles to the spectacle? Northallerton Town Council, for instance, wants to “plough” the race through the town’s May Fair – in the High Street. “We want to form a group to put the town on the map with this race,” declares town Mayor John Forrest.

Er, won’t the race itself put Northallerton “on the map”? Ditto Middlesbrough, a stage start. But £10,000 has been made available to fund “projects” along the Teesside route. Of course one expects flags, banners, decorations. Hopefully Middlesbrough will fly the Yorkshire flag from its Town Hall – and keep it there afterwards – a firm statement of the Yorkshire identity to which it too often seems indifferent. The James Cook hospital could also use this opportunity to introduce the Yorkshire flag to one of its three flagpoles - and leave it there, a comforting sight for patients and visitors from far flung places like Wensleydale.

But what chiefly creates the atmosphere of the Tour de Yorkshire is the enthusiasm – and often imagination - of the spectators. But with the fair in Northallerton High Street, precious spectator space is lost.