Himalayas

If I may quote from the blog of a brother cabbie:

The Himalayan Mountains have moved to Canberra.  Yup. Speed humps at Canberra Airport. In particular the last one when exiting the airport.

For the life of me I can’t understand why they built that thing so friggin high. My taxi full of passengers and luggage has absolutely no way of clearing this obstacle without scraping the bottom of the car out.  Once again it is quite obvious that Steve Byron does not have a clue. Yes the speed hump is necessary. But no it is not necessary to have the thing so high that it is nigh on impossible to clear it without scraping.

I suspect a few cabs are scraping that particular speed-hump. It’s common for four people to share a cab from the airport to a hotel or two, filling the boot with luggage. Add in a cab-driver (and some cabdrivers are fairly large characters in their own right), some of the older cabs down on their springs are going to have a tough time.

But even if you shave the speedbumps, the whole airport road system is a mess. Yeah, I know it’s the same at Perth and Sydney, but honestly, I’ve been driving cabs for three years now, and it seems the roads in and around the airport have been in flux for the whole of that time.

“Every day’s a new adventure out here,” I tell the passengers, and the frequent flyers nod their heads.

Here’s what’s wrong:

• Layout. The arrangement of access roads changes constantly and bears little relation to efficiency. Loops and multiple corners. The word “maze” is one that I hear a lot. For we cabbies, after we drop a fare at the terminal entrance, we’d like to get to the taxi rank quickly. In the old days, you could just roll forward a few car lengths, and you’d be on the pickup rank. Nowadays, you have to negotiate the maze, which involves about a kilometre of ever-changing, poorly surfaced roads crowded with desperate motorists. It’s inefficient.
• Surface. These are hastily and poorly constructed roads. The current arrangement involves a lot of travel over what used to be the car park, and there are drains and uneven cambers to contend with. One drain is so deep that you could damage your suspension if you hit it wrong. Other surfaces are just tarmac sprayed onto gravel and they wear away quickly. A bit of rain and potholes of immense proportions develop. Gravel sprays around.
• Obstacles. There are bollards and barriers and speedhumps and posts and signs and fences everywhere. It’s confusing and dangerous.
• Artwork. Lanes are occasionally marked. In places the surface is several layers of previous markings for car parks and vanished intersections, painted over and scrubbed out, but still faintly visible. Late at night and especially in the rain, these ghost markings come back to life.
• Legals. The constantly-changing arrangement bears only the faintest resemblance to the gazetted public roads. The main access traverses what used to be the cabyard. It’s not a public road in the eyes of the law, so what status do the pedestrian crossings and traffic signs have? There’s one speed limit sign that is mounted in the coach parking area. Frequently it is obscured by (surprise, surprise) a coach parked beside it. In any case, the cabs take a different route. One could argue that the speed limit for cabs is the default limit for Canberra, which is 50 kilometres an hour.
• Drivers. We cabbies quickly get used to the changes. (And just when we do, they change it again.) But for Canberra residents picking Granny up at the airport, their last visit may have been months or years ago, and they are totally bewildered. They stop at intersections, they go the wrong way, they reverse into oncoming traffic, they change direction suddenly. I can’t blame them at all, but they present a significant hazard.
• Passengers. There are pedestrian crossings marked, but they are often in inconvenient locations. Pedestrians, encumbered by children and luggage, walk across the busy roads at random locations, directions and speeds.
• The pick-up/drop-off area. It’s tiny. At peak hours, it is full and vehicles begin to double park, further slowing traffic. The official parking is so inconvenient and expensive that people ignore the signs prohibiting pick-up (and what legal status do they have anyway?) to pull into the drop-off area where they wait for family or friends and then load them and their bags into their vehicle, getting in the way of more considerate drivers.

Trust me, I’m barely scraping the surface here. The airport parking and traffic arrangements are a shambles. They are confusing and dangerous.

Yes, I know that there’s a clear vision for a new terminal. I’m impressed. It will be start of the art, it will be convenient, it will have pick-up and drop-off areas separated, it will have an undercover taxi rank so passengers don’t have to line up in piercing cold or blazing sun.

But in the meantime, the situation sucks. I’m reminded of a stadium that was designed to have a wonderful, ingenious cantilevered roof. It looked flimsy, but it was soundly designed to cope with winds and stresses and weight of snow or hail. Only trouble was that the construction sequence hadn’t been planned well, and there was one intermediate stage where the ingenious roof was inadequately supported and a gust of wind blew the whole thing down.

That’s Canberra Airport’s road system.

The way we were

Here’s Google Maps view (including Streetview) of Canberra International Airport, as of three years ago. It bears only the most tenuous relationship to the current situation. None of the roundabouts visible on the photograph exist. The ordered carparks are vanished. It’s a wilderness of construction. It is all but impossible to reconcile my video with the Google view.

View Larger Map

Run-in

I once had a road-rage encounter with a driver here. Clearly he wasn’t au fait with the traffic arrangements. He began by changing lanes from the highway to the access road at the last possible moment. Without indicating. Thereby cutting me off in my own smooth entry. He moved slowly through the maze, driving carefully down the middle of the two marked lanes. He then came to an intersection where he had right of way, stopped in the middle of it and peered at the signs. I was trying to move around the obstruction when he jerked into motion and headed for the carpark. Of course it took him forever to negotiate the entrance. The notice explaining the system of operation (A: Press button. B: Boom gate opens. C: Drive through and park) was taxing his resources.

After we parked, he approached me belligerently, accusing me of driving like a lunatic. Me, in an environment where I knew every lane, every turn, every sign. And he didn’t. I calmly pointed out his many errors.

Like hell I did. He was a lot smaller than me, so I punched him hard in the face and kicked him savagely in the nuts. My army training wasn’t wasted.

The truth lies somewhere in between, but it wasn’t pretty. (And there was no bloodshed.)

With an eye to illustrating this blog post, I got my camera out to video the construction zone that the exit road has become, complete with speed humps, bollards. I finished by focussing on the “End Roadworks” sign.

Then I remembered that I really wanted to go around to the cab rank to pick up a fare from the dozens of passengers patiently waiting. I’d missed the turn and it was a long way to where I could make even an illegal u-turn.

I couldn’t even do that, because there was this galoot beside me, blocking any lane-change, flashing his lights etc.

I thought back to me progress along the exit road. I’d been at the speed limit, I hadn’t held anyone up, my video work hadn’t involved any dangerous manoeuvres, or even a lack of due care and attention. But obviously this bloke disagreed.

The lights were red, we both stopped, he got out. Uh-oh. Mindful of the earlier encounter, I hit the central locking.

Somewhat warily, I wound the window down. The other driver didn’t look enraged or upset. Quite the opposite.

He introduced himself as “Stephen Byron, from Canberra Airport” and wanted to know if the video was for my own private use. I told him it was for a blog post, and that seemed to satisfy him.

Now I’ve actually got a lot of respect for Steve. He cops a lot of flak, he has done a great job in transforming the airport into a world-class facility (or will be when the thing’s finished) and most of all, he has been relentless in pointing out the folly of a land developer who wants to build directly under the flightpath.

It’s an airport close to the city, it has clear open land under the three main landing/take-off paths, it should stay that way. Only Reagan National in Washington DC comes anywhere close to being as conveniently located to a major city, and even then there’s a constant flow of aircraft along the Potomac and over the Washington Monument.

Canberra International Airport should stay where it is, it should remain unobstructed in operation, and it should cater for the demand. It’s a valid diversion airport for Sydney, and as a frequent international traveller myself, I’d like to see some actual international flights.

I just happen to think that the way the airport roads have been handled really sucks.
–Skyring