Airport pick-ups, Canberra style. Images of Canberra.

creative_canberran said :

http://www.canberraairport.com.au/air_toAndFrom/pickup.cfm

And if you stay longer than 10mins, you simply pay the normal parking rates, so there’s no fines or anything.

The “10 min free parking” bays are not particularly well signposted, for drivers or arrived passengers. Go out to the airport sometime and pretend you have just picked up your baggage. Look for the signs indicating where the pick-up bays are. There is one near the exit, pointing in the direction of the taxi/bus rank. After that you’re on your own.

Now take the point of view of a driver looking to pick up a passenger. You drive in to the airport, there’s a variable message display sitting to the side saying, “PICKUP BAYS ->”. After that the only signs you’ll see are little coreflute boards, no bigger than about A3 or so. They are blue & green background with some three-inch high text proclaiming “pickup bays” – they are not easily visible, and the writing is illegible from a moving car.

The pickup bays themselves have no cover, so you’re SOL if it’s raining. Both Brisbane and Sydney have covered pickup bays, with covered walkways leading to them. In Brisbane there are two or three lanes of traffic – one for taxis/busses, the next for pickup/dropoff (drop off at one end of the road, pickup at the other), the next for cars heading to/from the parking facilities.

Granted, there may be a point in time at which the construction hoarding to the left of the ramp and at the top of the ramp gets taken away and we’ll see a wonderful pickup area unveiled.

In the meantime the signage for the current pickup bays is useless to both passengers and drivers. Sure, if you’re a frequent user of the airport you’ll find the pickup bay because you know where it is.

At the very least, the signage indicating the path to the pickup bays should be black-on-yellow, the same as road-work signs, and be presented with 20cm high letters. The signs should be easily seen and read from a moving car, in order to direct traffic more smoothly.

For the passengers, there should be at least one sign with a map indicating where the pickup bays are actually located. They have a nice map on the web site, all they need to do is print that out and paste it up on a sign just outside the exit, and near the road that the passengers will have to cross (which of course has no pedestrian crossing along its entire length).

I-filed said :

Easy. Three options:
1. Drive to arrivals and develop momentary car trouble. Open bonnet. Your friends jump in, and away you go.
2. Drive to arrivals having instructed your friends to limp. When you get hassled, threaten to sic HREOC onto them
3. Go around the little circle again and again (unless they’ve closed that option off) very slowly, and get your friends to walk down and jump in quickly.

If you’re brazen, you’ll get away with any of the above.

And for the first two you will walk away with a fine from the AFP for driving past a well placed “No Entry – Authorised Vehicles Only” on the round-a-bout exit. Picking up in the round-a-bout as well as the no stopping zone next to the carparks will also land you a fine from the AFP. It is one of their duties (Amongst others) to ensure the free movement of traffic around the airport, so be sure you will get caught (Whether it be the first time, or the second, or the third etc.).

The road next to the multi storey carpark has now been sign as a no stopping zone (Not that it wasn’t obvious before).

I have been told all carparks have the 10 minute grace period as long as you do not place your ticket into the Pay Machine within the 10 minutes. However, we have the cheapest major airport parking in Australia so don’t complain, it could be alot worse. I agree fully with the fact that there is no waiting shelter at the designated 10 minute zone, that is because it was a late after thought. Place in a complaint to CAG at http://www.canberraairport.com.au and they may listen (I Stress may).

Grail said :

There’s cities in Australia where parking for work each day can set you back $30+, so the occasional fee for the airport is comparatively miniscule.

I went to Westfield Belconnen on the weekend and noted the daily rate was over $30. They’re all having a laugh – back to what I was paying in Sydney.