A colleague was moaning recently - he does a lot of that - about the fact that a taxi ride from Auckland Airport to his home in Balmoral had taken as long as the flight from Wellington.
At least his gridlock drama occurred on the way home - the house
wasn't about to taxi down a runway and fly off without him. Had it happened on the way to the airport he might have had even richer material for a grizzle.
Traffic remains the top reason for missing flights. A recent survey by flight comparison website Skyscanner found that of travellers who missed flights, 21 per cent said they got stuck in traffic. Second was "I missed the flight being called", coming in at 12 per cent.
Third on the list, with 11 per cent, was "I didn't leave enough time to get to the airport". I reckon a few of the people blaming traffic could quite reasonably be grouped with this chronologically challenged mob.
It's a bit unfair to blame "traffic" for missing flights; the problem tends to be a passenger's hopeful assumption that "there will be no traffic". In big cities - the kind that have decent-sized international airports - you tend to get the odd day where cars go slow and the lights are against you.
