KEY POINTS:
I have a couple of questions that need answering and I'd be grateful for your input.
Why are the people who run Auckland Airport such complete and utter bastards? And why do we put up with them?
Over Christmas and New Year I did what I'm sure a
lot of you did. I flew somewhere for a week. Having booked the Air New Zealand fare well in advance I got an extraordinarily cheap deal. Well, it was cheap until I realised I faced one huge hurdle. How to get to the airport and back home without having to take out another mortgage.
To park at the airport for a week would cost more than the entire airfare. To take a cab there and back would also be at least $180, again more than the expense of the flight to Queenstown.
Eventually, I discovered the cunning swines who run the airport company had built a new park-and-ride service - a kilometre away from where you really want to be, but it offers a slightly cheaper deal than the car parks they own near the terminal.
It added another 20 minutes fluffing around, waiting for the minibus at either end of the trip, but I guess I probably saved around $50 so it was worth the trouble.
You would think that from the profits they make from parking alone, the greedy sods would at least ensure they designed and built a domestic terminal building that that wasn't a national embarrassment.
Despite frequent pathetic facelifts, it is still the same Skyline garage that was erected there when I was a child. Believe me, that is a long time ago.
Actually, now I think about it, when I was a child Auckland had a different airport. It was called Whenuapai and it had a slightly smaller Skyline garage as a terminal.
Then some bright spark had the idea of creating an international airport at Mangere, and Whenuapai was handed over to the RNZAF.
While Mangere airport was publicly owned, it slowly and unimaginatively developed, sprouting a new, architecturally designed international terminal at one point and growing a few metered car parks by the domestic terminal shed.
There was a bar, a magazine shop and a place you could buy coffee.
Once the airport was privatised, it suddenly found space for entire restaurants, a sprawling industrial park, shopping centre and parking buildings that could suck 30 bucks out of your wallet in the blink of an eye.
The terminal is still the same ugly, congested, uncomfortable, nasty slum but the airport company manages to make big bucks from all its subsidiary businesses that are designed purely to extract as much cash from you as they can while you are trapped there.
The reason the airport company can treat you so badly is that it has no competition. It is a licence to print money at your expense because, if you want to fly somewhere, you have to use Mangere.
For many years, Waitakere's far-sighted mayor, Bob Harvey, has been waging a, so far futile, campaign to give Auckland a second commercial airport at Whenuapai.
Like most major infrastructural works these days, it is a great idea that never seems to get anywhere because someone opposes it.
Amazingly, it seems that people bought homes on the flight path to Whenuapai and never noticed the military airport or the planes that landed there. They now ferociously oppose the concept of a new commercial airport.
The Green Party has thrown its macrobiotic weight behind the anti-airport lobby, arguing if the second airport goes ahead the planet will spontaneously combust due to the extra carbon miles generated.
Indeed, according to the Green argument, we must never travel anywhere other than on foot.
However, Mayor Bob sent me some interesting facts.
A Toyota Prius, the only car acceptable to the Greens, emits 104g of CO2 per kilometre. A cut-price airline emits 95.7g of CO2 per passenger.
He argues, therefore, one person travelling in a modern plane emits less CO2 per kilometre than someone travelling in a Prius.
Harvey goes on to point out that 10 Priuses driving the 80km round trip from Greenhithe to Auckland Airport every day of the year emit 29.95 tonnes of carbon, whereas an Air New Zealand plane flying to Sydney emits just 23.3 tonnes tonnes of carbon per passenger. The message is simple. It is greener to fly across the Tasman than drive all the way to that God-awful money-magnet called Mangere airport.
I wish dear old Mayor Bob and his Whenuapai airport vision well, just so long as he doesn't charge too much for the luxury of parking there.
