Just when you thought the ****ers couldn't get any worse, there's this.
I did think the situation at the Qantas terminal was bad enough. If you are waiting there
after hours to pick somebody up, there is an abundance of parking in the office blocks, where you can wait until they call you. Except the airport has employed a bloke to drive around and tell you off. So they are spending money just to be ****ers.
But the debacle at the "Regional" terminal (used by the Virgin & Alliance FIFO flights) takes the cake. It is beyond freaking belief.
The terminal has a large pickup loop, which has always worked fine. But now they have decided to charge you $6 if you take longer than 5 minutes to make the loop. The stupidity of this is unbelievable.
The loop is large, and at peak times it could take you 5 minutes just to drive around, without even stopping. But what makes it worse is the ridiculous way they have implemented it. There are cameras going in, and boomgates going out.
The boomgates stop EVERY car, and you then have to wait till they go up, so even at its best it slows down traffic.
If the camera doesn't read your rego plate, you're stuffed. I've been stopped twice for that.
What most people don't know until they get caught, is that if you try to drive around, you get pinged. If you re-enter the loop with 10 minutes of exiting, you are
immediately pinged $6.
When you get caught, you have to exit your car and pay at the machine on the side, which of course holds up traffic even more. And yes, wait for it, it can delay the drivers behind who then get pinged through no fault of their own. Yes, that also happened to be. Old mate in front couldn't get his card to work then spent several minutes trying to feed his cash into the machine. So I refused to pay, creating even more delays for those stuck behind me.
This system must have cost them millions, and why? Just so they can be ****ers.
