I spent Thursday watching parts of the NTSB hearings on the bridge collapse, then it was off to St. Paul’s Union Depot for Design and Go. Until I get time to blog about the cool people I met there, here’s a little something from alert reader Eric, who says my most recent Sunday column struck a chord. I used the subject line from his e-mail as the headline on this post; here’s his actual e-mail:

Love your column. Normally I read about everyone else’s pet peeves and chuckle smartly, wondering why these people get so upset over little things. But then you wrote about the Guthrie parking ramps. And the rage I feel every few months during shows instantly grew. Seriously, are there more poorly designed ramps in the Cities?

These ramps are next to the Metrodome and Guthrie. It doesn’t take much insight to realize they will have frequent, event-type parking rushes where everyone shows up at once and tries to leave at once. Yet it feels like they were designed like a lot at the mall, where people dribble in and out all day long.

1. The machines that take your ticket take 5-6 seconds to do ANYTHING: spit out a ticket, tell you what to pay or accept your credit card. Not a big deal when you’re by yourself, but multiplied by the pace of things at event parking times becomes an issue.
2. Only a handful of ‘pay before returning to your car’ machines which creates absolutely laughable lines at the end of a show/metrodome event
3. No ability to handle pay as you enter during event parking (your column today)–which is kind of a silly design choice, dontcha think, given the location/usage of this lot?
4. No signage or communication to tell people they can pay with a card when they leave.
5. On the city ramp next to the one across from the Guthrie (closer to Mill City) you drive on the LEFT side of the ramp to go up or down.

Seriously, I’m not sure if others will respond to your column today, but if so, I’d love to learn if the parking lot engineers of the world think these are all good, valuable, efficient improvements and how the city of Minneapolis contracted with the silly people who make these pay machines. Surely better technology must exist?

Thanks for letting me vent. But you probably get that a lot!

I do, but that’s O.K. — it’s my job.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 13th, 2008 at 11:42 pm and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.