I like that my parking lot (and by that I mean where I park for the train) is big. No matter when I arrive, there's always plenty of space. This is a good thing, and the reason why I drive 20 minutes to this lot instead of taking my chances every morning with the local one.
What I hate is the way you pay. There are these machines where you put in your two dollars, punch in your space number, and get your receipt. Half the time the machines don't work. The other half of the time there's a line behind the lady who can't figure out that no matter how many times she smooths out that dollar, what she's got to do is turn it around to get it to work. Sometimes the train people would station an actual person at the machine whose sole job was to swap dollar bills for dollar coins, which work every time. Great on days when the person was there, sit and wait on days when she's not.
Oh, sure, you could get a monthly pass, but that's a lousy deal for two reasons. First, it'll cost you $40, which is basically 20 days worth of parking at $2/day. That's basically the full month, not like you're really saving much money - if you're out for any meaningful amount of days that month, you'll actually lose money. But second and worse, there's no automatic payment for the monthly pass at this lot. So on the first of the month you've got to sit in an even *longer* line to pay your $40. If you wait until later in the week, paying cash to park for the first few days? You're costing yourself money.
Well, all that's gone away now. Now we have a "pay the attendant at the booth and then park anywhere" system, which in theory is much better. Always a human there means you don't have to have exact change, nor do you need perfectly crisp bills or anything. You also don't have to remember a space number or keep your ticket.
Except for a few things. This lot has maybe 8-10 lanes where you can park. There's two feeder lanes for cars to come in, and then you take a left in whichever lane you think has the spaces. This alone has been a problem because people in the right lane just go ahead and take that left regardless of who is behind them or in the left lane, but that's not the problem anymore. To avoid people going around the attendants, what they've done is to block off all those lane entrances with cement barriers. So now there's three booths that allow you access to the lot. Two lanes of traffic, three booths - so already there's a constant jam of cars trying to squeeze past so that they can always be in the shortest lane, even if it's a physical impossibility to get their car from here to there.
But then - wait - it gets worse. By blocking all those lanes they've also taken away all the ways to get *out* of the lot! Now, at the far end of the parking lot (so far in the corner that nobody ever needs to actually park there), is the single exit. So you can imagine what this means as 20 rows of cars all head diagonally straight for it! When they first announced they'd be going to this system I thought that the biggest traffic jam would be getting in - I hadn't even considered the nightmare of getting out.
System needs a little work.
