Ok. Parking had to come up sometime. I have had my fair share of ridiculous moments when it comes to parking. I’ve been fined so often that I consider myself the chief fund raiser for several Sydney councils. There is certainly room for a post specifically concentrating on parking fines, especially in NSW where it really has got out of hand, but today I want to vent on another kind of parking….the Westfield Shoppingtown parking.
My local Westfield has recently adopted a new parking system. Gone are the clunky old machines that spit out a ticket giving you 3 free hours of parking. In their place are even clunkier NEW machines that spit out a ticket giving you 2 free hours!
Firstly, I want that damn hour back. It grinds me that they can just cut an hour away like it never existed. How dare they? 3 hours seems to me quite a reasonable amount of time to do the grocery shopping, buy that gift for your mum or try on a few pairs of jeans. I aint a big shopper by any stretch, but 2 hours just doesn’t seem to cut it. Of course, if you stay for longer than 2 hours, you get hit with parking fees that get higher by the half-hour. Criminal…especially for a place that should be encouraging you to shop, not charging you for the privilege.
Also, most Westfields have cinema complex’s these days and it just so happens that alot more movies run for over 2 hours. So, not only do you get hit with inflated movie ticket prices and even more inflated candy bar prices, now you got to pay extra bucks for parking. Not on!
The craziest part of all this is that most people lose track of time and only realize they are up for some parking fees when they insert their ticket in the clunky new machine. Now they have no other choice but to pull out their credit card and go through that automated paying service. All the while, I am the poor fool stuck 6 cars behind them sitting motionless in a gridlock stretching up to the roof of the parking station.
Surely, when you need to manage a large number of cars and people, you create a system that is streamlined and QUICK. You certainly don’t introduce a system that SLOWS EVERYTHING DOWN!
Christ, it’s only parking for god’s sake. We are visiting your shops, buying your products….can’t you just allow us to park and leave with ease?
I guess not.
