Airport parking free but not free enough for some
From Monday next week the free-parking period at the New Plymouth Airport will change from one hour to 20 minutes and the hourly rate will double to $2. Reporter Jane Matthews tested out the change.
What can be done in 20 minutes at the New Plymouth Airport? Not a lot, I discovered. After grabbing a ticket, parking the car, ordering a coffee and chatting to some locals I had to fast walk back to the vehicle and even then I was over my free limit by two minutes, and hadn’t taken a sip of my coffee.
On Monday that didn’t matter. But from February 12 being parked for that extra two minutes would have meant my free parking was finished and I was going to have to start paying the hourly rate of $2.
This 40 minute reduction in the free parking allowance and a doubling of the hourly rate is being implemented to help pay for a $28.7 million upgrade to the terminal.
The new limits mean if you want to drop someone off at the airport and go in to wave them goodbye as they fly off into the blue yonder, you’re probably going to have to hand over a gold coin or two for the privilege. From the time we took a parking ticket, found a car park, walked inside the airport, looked at the arrivals and departures board and ordered a coffee more than five minutes had passed.
After waiting for a coffee and having a chat to some people we knew (and let’s face it, you’re guaranteed to run into someone you know at the New Plymouth airport) we were 18 minutes deep and it was time to get back to the car or face paying the piper.
Even without having loved ones to hug goodbye and walking quickly back to the car there was no way we were driving around the car park and out the gate without going over the 20 minute limit. Some airport users agreed the 20 minute time period was too short to get in a proper goodbye. Lorraine Coster thought it would be ‘‘impossible’’.
‘‘Especially if it’s busy, busy, busy,’’ Coster said.
‘‘I think it should stay how it is.’’ On Monday Coster had been at the airport for 40 minutes with her husband, granddaughter and her son, who they were dropping off for a flight to Auckland.
Coster called herself a ‘‘casual’’ airport user and said it was mainly family she picked up and dropped off from the terminal. She believed the reduction in the free parking limit would change her pick-up/drop-off behaviour.
‘‘It’ll certainly be a deterrent,’’ she said. ‘‘You’d be looking at your watch the whole time.’’
However, visitors from outside New Plymouth were largely unable to keep a straight face when asked their thoughts on the changes to the free parking period and hourly rate increase.
Colleen Jones, who often flies between Auckland and New Plymouth, said there was a ‘‘big difference’’ between the two airports.
Jones said to pay for parking in Auckland you almost had to ‘‘mortgage your car’’. But New Plymouth was the opposite.
‘‘We never complain about anything here,’’ she said.
Jones said if she was flying into Auckland her friends would sit in a free car park nearby and wait for her to contact them before heading in to pick her up.
Xanthia Bollen and Kathy Frank had a similar strategy. They wait to hear from the arriving friend before they head into the airport car park.
The pair, originally from Taranaki but now living in Wellington and Auckland, said people just got used to paying.
‘‘It’s good here as opposed to Auckland,’’ Frank said.
At Auckland Airport nothing is free and for $2 you’ll get just 10 minutes of parking. Stay an hour and it will cost you $11. But you kind of expect that. It’s Auckland after all.
Here in Taranaki we’ve got used to being a bit spoiled. And even though
20 minutes free is still longer than the
15 in Palmerston North or the 10 in Wellington, it still feels like one of those little loopholes that made life just that little bit easier, has been closed. Which is, of course, understandable but regrettable.