Intricately tied in with the tradition of Christmas we also have the Boxing day sales. Its one of the few days a year where the vast carparks of shopping malls completely overflow due to the demand for shopping that cars often floods out onto the streets. People can spend just as much time getting to the mall and finding a car park as they can shopping itself. And we often get reports about it in media, like this from the NZ Herald:
Traffic was one of the biggest headaches – cars were nose-to-tail for more than 500m from Westfield’s St Lukes mall in Auckland, while the motorway was backed up a similar distance at the Sylvia Park exit.
When the Herald visited St Lukes, it took more than half an hour to get a park, and only after a man led the way to his soon-to-be-empty space.
Some shoppers reported circling the carpark for up to an hour before finding an empty spot.
I don’t know about you but sitting in heavy traffic for 500m and then circling and looking for a car park for 30 minutes to an hour is not my idea of fun, it’s also hardly the ‘freedom’ cars are promised to give us. Perhaps in future, this day more than any other is something that Auckland Transport should consider targeting to try and get people using public transport to do their shopping. This should especially be the case once we get our new PT network implemented with a lot more high frequency services giving much better coverage across the region.
Some people like to argue that shopping isn’t easy without a car but personally I think that is largely nonsense. Most shopping at malls consists items small enough to fit into bags and is perfectly easy to carry on a bus or train, my Christmas shopping for example fit into just a handful of bags and was easy enough to carry with me on a train.
So come on AT, how about a bit of a campaign next year about using PT to do boxing day shopping as in many cases it would sure beat the alternative of sitting in your car circling for a park for 30 minutes.
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