Traffic wardens keep us safe from chaos | Carrie Quinlan

Traffic wardens are holding back the end of civilisation. Photograph: Frank Baron for the Guardian

There are some British towns or cities you expect to transform themselves, sooner or later, into dystopian hellholes. London, obviously. The great industrial cities: Manchester, Belfast, Glasgow, Sheffield. Blackpool, with its bright lights and its "fun"; East Grinstead, with its ley lines enticing apocalyptic sects like catnip; Hull, with its inaccessibility and smell of fish. I'd even go for Brighton as a decent outside bet, because you know how hippies can turn. But I wouldn't in a million years have predicted that Aberystwyth would be the first to go all Blade Runnery. Cheerful market town; home of Wales' oldest university and its national library; lovely cliff railway. But first to go it is.

Reports come in of lorries parked askew on pavements, every disabled parking bay filled by a able-bodied replicant's car. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the skies were a permanent black, and the rain fell without pause. Though the latter mainly because it's in Wales. What's needed is a Deckard to clean up the mess. A vaguely mysterious loner who, not caring that he is shunned by the rest of society, stamps on the transgressors and puts everything in order. Aberystwyth had just such a person. Three such people in fact, and it threw them away, with their black and yellow uniforms that marked them out as unstoppable law machines, and their little stubby pencils of justice. Because Aberystwyth is now, whisper it, a town without traffic wardens.

It all began so simply. A straightforward handover of enforcement of parking regulations from the police to the council. Nothing sinister there. No intimations of the brave new world to come. But no one seems to have told the council that the police were giving up control on 31 May, and no one seems to have told the police that the council were assuming control from about the same time next year. What a bunch of, and I use the term advisedly, berks.

No more traffic wardens sounds like a marvellous thing. Freedom, at last, from the not-being-able-to-park-wherever-you-like nightmare. And a nice council/police cock-up is always fun. But, tragically, it turns out that peril though they are, we need the boys and girls in yellow. Not that they are in yellow any more. They have all manner of odd uniforms. I was in Oxford the other day and assumed a former Soviet bloc military band were visiting. Turns out it was just a crackdown on meter-feeders.

Sad to say we need them, it seems we can't work out for ourselves that parking in a disabled spot or halfway across the pavement is mean and selfish and we need the threat of a ?60 fine and a tacky patch of windscreen to show us the light. That's fairly depressing, isn't it? That we can't manage something as straightforward as a bit of public-spiritedness in parking. Big chunks of the world need sorting out and require the imagination and engagement of us all, and we can't be reasonable about parking.

It's turned out not to be the teachers or the (real) journalists or the philosophers or the judges or even the librarians who are keeping us safe from chaos and the end of civilisation, it's the friendless folk walking the mean streets saying, "Can't change it: written your number down now."

So, reactionary though it may sound, pity the humble traffic warden. It's them or pandemonium. Or, at least, it's them or the triumph of the inconsiderate.

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