



Rich car park owners put us at risk


Wade Gregory is a working muso. He’s not unfamiliar with hauling a big-arse keyboard in and out of the city. A while ago, with a Saturday night gig on at the Metro Arts Centre in Edward Street, he opted to spend a bit of the folding stuff on an off street car park.

“On-street parking is a lottery,” he says. “All those 19-year-old bogans going to the Vic need somewhere to park, right? They get into messy fights at cab ranks. Can’t have that.”

So fuggedabouddit. Gregory figured to drop a few dollars on the problem and avoid the hassle. There’s a new secure parking place not far from the gig. He drives in, doesn't see any parking attendants or any booths, and he think to himself it's one of these new automated places.

Very Terminator.

I’ll let him tell his own story now. 

“So I arrive back at ten minutes past ten o'clock: an early night in the city, but I was heading out to the Valley to support some more live music. Luckily I had borrowed my friend's keyboard for the night and so the gear I was lugging was lighter than usual. I say luckily because the massive big garage door was slammed shut. At 10.10pm on a Saturday night. In ol' Bris Vegas. There was another chap standing around with his girlfriend, looking just as dumbfounded as I. The exit fee, I presume to get some overweight security guard to come down and press a button, was something like $50, or I could come back in the morning and pay for two days parking (which turned out to be cheaper).

“I went to see where they advertised their opening times There was nothing on the street, no A-frame display, no electronic sign like QPAC's that says "closing midnight". The only place they revealed their closing time was in small print as you entered. When you collect your ticket at the boom gate, you have to lean out of your window slightly and peer down at a sign: it had all the parking charges, and then in smaller print below that, their opening hours.

“As if that wasn't bad enough: the next morning I caught the bus into town to collect my car. Like I said, it was a fully automated carpark so I inserted my ticket into the pay station. It wouldn't read my ticket, but instead displayed an error message. So I had to use the intercom to speak to someone (I assume in Sydney) and explain how frustrated I was. He pressed a few buttons remotely and I was able to feed in my hard-earned into the machine. Then as I went to drive out, I put the ticket in the machine at the boom gate. Yet again, ticket read failure. I smashed the intercom button, explained to the same guy that I had already paid my bloody ticket, and I was outta there.”

Fast forward and you’ll find Daniel Knight in a similar bind. He’d worked late and headed to car park to discover the automated machine was on the blink.

“No problem,” says Daniel, “there is another machine, and I headed over to the long line to pay for my ticket at this secondary unit.  It was then I noticed a long line of cars backing out from the exit.  I paid and headed to my car on the rooftop. I park on the roof as a matter of choice… I enjoy the view and brief wind on my face… it’s a small freedom but one I enjoy choosing.”

Knight drove down the ramps until he reached the tail of the exit line, at which point it took just under another hour to clear through. 

“The reason became apparent when I got to the gate.  Because of the time it had taken me to get to there, additional charges had been placed on my ticket – $35 I believe from memory– and I was being asked by the machine to make this extra payment before I exited.” 

He was just the last of a long line of suckers getting bent over the same barrel.

You can understand their anger, but it can get worse, much worse.

If you are woman, working late and alone and for whatever reason your car park features broken ticket machines, surly off-site staff, and an exciting array of poorly advertised penalty charges, you can find yourself in a bad place very quickly.

Twice now recently I’ve come across stories of women trapped in multi-level car parks because the cheap ratbastard greedheads who run these aesthetically worthless money traps can’t be arsed putting on staff. The machines constantly malfunction and when a frustrated, or traumatized customer complains the only option they’re left with is pay extra now, or pay extra later. Or I suppose you could follow the example of one woman who had curled up into a ball under the torrent of abuse directed at her by some slug in a remote facility, most likely in Sydney.

It’s a situation that’s snuck up on a lot of city workers the last couple of years, as the super rich owners of these car parks have looked for every opportunity to pare back their outlays while squeezing ever more profits out of the public. The really sneaky part of closing the doors and charging people extra to leave is that most of these places are now unstaffed and there's no reason they couldn't be open 24/7. But shutting them down and charging some mug fifty bucks to press a button is a great little earner, innit?

Unfortunately, it’s going to end in a woman disappearing from one of these dumps and turning up in a shallow grave a few miles outside of the city.

I’m just pointing this out now so that when it happens, and it will, these scumbags can’t say they weren’t warned.


  • If they're not staffed on-site, then it's amazing someone hasn't just tied back the boom gate with some wire or string. They're not heavy just a long piece of aluminium. Just saying...

    Date and time
    February 07, 2013, 7:25AM
    • A few years ago, the carpark near my office had a spate of people going full Dukes of Hazard on the boom gate. They got tired of replacing it for a while, so it just sat there for a while with a snapped off stump of a gate.

      Sweet Sister Morphine
      The windmills of your mind
      Date and time
      February 07, 2013, 10:43AM
    • I like the way you think.

      Date and time
      February 07, 2013, 10:59AM
    • @ PO - I've done that on several occasions. Helps if you have a partner (in crime) and you both push the boom upwards (it often takes 2) and the other holds while one 'escapes'.

      In the valley once, years ago, someone put a chain across the vacant block so my late departure access was blocked. Turned the van around, backed up to the chain, hooked it onto the tow ball and ripped the chain out.

      But, the first story above talked of a big garage door. Maybe we'd need to drive a tank to 'address' that (if we could get inside).

      - - -

      Looking at the 'progress' of places like Sydney, it is becoming quite clear that one travels close to the city centre by car, parks, and gets a taxi. And, if one is working till late, pre-books a taxi for the return leg.


      Date and time
      February 07, 2013, 12:07PM
    • Strange but when i read this piece the first thing that came into my head was "Dukes of Hazzard", and not even the intellectual, revisionist Jessica Simpson version either.

      TV has retarded us all and there is no cure.

      mint slice
      Date and time
      February 07, 2013, 12:14PM
  • I doubt these scumbags care about safety. It just gets in the way of their undying greed to make a much money as possible. And their terms and conditions (the really small print on entry) will indemnify them from any wrong dong in any case. After a half hour wait with no attendant on the way out I might have been tempted to start holding the boom gate open.

    Date and time
    February 07, 2013, 7:29AM
    • The well honed scam in many US cities is towing. You'll find plenty of empty car parks for restaurants who've closed for the night but packed street parking for bar patrons who have kicked on. The restaurants display signs saying they tow vehicles parked there, and they do. Inside of 15 minutes. The tow driver gets a cut, the restaurant gets a cut and the junkyard where you car now resides is 10 miles out of town. The taxi driver makes some money on the side and he's gone before you walk into the office. Inside there's more grime than you've ever seen and a thug in a cage who collects the money. The sign over the hole where you make the exchange for your keys reads "Don't argue. Just pay up or your car gets to stay here until you learn some manners."

      Date and time
      February 07, 2013, 7:34AM
      • one my my mates went to an event and didn't realise they'd parked in a tow-away area. Neither did anyone else in that carpark, and when everyone came to get their cars a guy was there who told them he'd asked the tow truck drive to leave them be. And asked for $5 from each person for his efforts.
        They were all happy, all paid - HE is the tow truck driver. So on one hand he did lie, but on the other everybody wins - while he makes less money off each car he does it in the bare minimum of time rather than thirty trips, all the patrons have saved themselves a fee.

        Should have been better signed I think, but it's your responsibility to read conditions

        chewing salty razors
        Date and time
        February 07, 2013, 11:18AM
    • Uhhhhh, I dunno. If I'm heading out to the city for a big night on the tiles (okay, so once upon a time, when I *used* to go out), one of the simple precautions is knowing when the last train/bus is or what time the car-park closes.

      I know, it makes me seem like a fuddy duddy, but it's always seemed a lot more fun to me to know that I'm not going to have my car impounded or something and spend a lot more time in the city than I was planning to.

      As for the queue to get out, that's just plan wrong. Some car-park tries that on me, they're going to get a snarky letter from the ACCC with photographic evidence of why they shouldn't be making their problem my problem. Yeah, that's right, I said it, the ACCC.

      Dave W
      Date and time
      February 07, 2013, 8:02AM
      • Ooooh that's scary Dave.

        I imagine you're being humorous. Surely you don't mean the same ACCC which has, for 25 years, refused to arrest the duopoly that Coles & Woolworths have been stitching together to make Australian grocey prices the highest in the world?

        The same ACCC which is happy to see dairy farmers going to the wall daily, because they make less money from milk than it costs to produce? Thanks again to the duopoly.

        I think if some parking attendants were to pop round to the ACCC offices with Halloween masks on and shout 'Boo!' the ACCC would quickly fold up any inquiry into shoddy practices.

        Monster Mash
        Date and time
        February 07, 2013, 10:24AM

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