Secrets to the St. Thomas parking ramp
Today I cruised over to St. Thomas for an extended lunch hour to watch a speech by Ann Coulter, best selling political conservative author. After it was over, I went back to the parking ramp to jump in my car and head back to work. Not so fast Troy! leaving the campus took about 15 extra minutes of my precious time as I watched 2 people get stuck at the gate. St. Thomas' ramp has a "simple, automated system" that works like this:
1) from skyway, take elevator down to "R1" where you walk up to a machine, insert your ticket, and pay with cash or credit for your parking.
2) get back in elevator and ride down to "R2", where you parked your car
3) as you drive out, you insert your "pre-paid" ticket again and the gate and garage door open to let you out.
This "system" works great when you have people leaving at random and they follow the signs. It is a nightmare when you have a flood of people all leaving at the same time after an event, and a select few fail to follow the signs. Two cars got to the gate and found out the hard way that they didn't pre-pay their ticket at the machine, and they had a line of a cars all waiting behind them to get out. So now we're all putting our cars in reverse as these folks try to inch back and forth to get out the way, so those of us who knew the "system" and paid our tickets could leave and get on with our lives. St. Thomas probably saves a few bucks by not paying a real person to take parking money, at the same time maybe shaving 50 cents off our costs. But at what cost to people's time and utter frustration are they achieving any success?
1) from skyway, take elevator down to "R1" where you walk up to a machine, insert your ticket, and pay with cash or credit for your parking.
2) get back in elevator and ride down to "R2", where you parked your car
3) as you drive out, you insert your "pre-paid" ticket again and the gate and garage door open to let you out.
This "system" works great when you have people leaving at random and they follow the signs. It is a nightmare when you have a flood of people all leaving at the same time after an event, and a select few fail to follow the signs. Two cars got to the gate and found out the hard way that they didn't pre-pay their ticket at the machine, and they had a line of a cars all waiting behind them to get out. So now we're all putting our cars in reverse as these folks try to inch back and forth to get out the way, so those of us who knew the "system" and paid our tickets could leave and get on with our lives. St. Thomas probably saves a few bucks by not paying a real person to take parking money, at the same time maybe shaving 50 cents off our costs. But at what cost to people's time and utter frustration are they achieving any success?
posted by webdh | 3:02 PM
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