Re: Car park
Sadly your right... pretty standard behaviour nowadays for any University to extract as much cash from everyone as possible - whether your a student, guest, staff member, research project or other. They have no interest in the bigger picture or other benefits - until said cash is in the bank.
The VC's usually do rather well from it all though.
Also annoyingly... not really many options to avoid using it - as you'd expect, it's in the middle of nowhere.