Why not send a PM to Skyring who has been a long time member on this forum? I am sure he will be forthcoming with solutions for you
I'm leaving on the first of April for San Francisco. Roadtrip to DC and back taking five weeks, so the roads of Canberra will be Skyring-free until early May.
I drive Silver Service. "Betsy" - TX-18, a lovely silver Statesman on the night shift from three in the evening until whenever the work runs out. Sometimes it's a thirteen hour shift, but usually I call it quits about midnight.
I do airport pickups but usually only for people I know. I really don't like responding to Silver Service jobs at the airport for a variety of reasons, but mainly because I'm embarrassed at the cost, and if a passenger doesn't show it's quite stressful. And now I can't even go and wait in the lounge, due to the double whammy of losing WP and non-flying lounge privileges ending.
There's an extra ten dollar parking fee now, on top of the eleven dollar Silver fee. So the cheapest ride to Civic or Barton is going to be around forty dollars. More if there's waiting involved, and planes are often delayed. Call me if someone else if footing the bill.
The regular cab rank at the airport is working fairly well. There's a bottleneck at the boomgate, which limits the flow to one cab every twenty seconds or so once the half dozen cabs waiting at the actual rank have been used up. It's a stupid system involving an awkward approach to put the coins in the box without scraping the car, a delay while the coins clank down and the ticket is printed, and an awkward getaway. Generally we can cope with a planeload dribbling out, but when we get several landing within a few minutes, the queue builds up and up.
It's better than it was, anyway. It will get steadily better once they get the second half of the terminal built, and the commissionaire comes on line. That will be an extra dollar fifty to the regular cab fare, making it a three fifty surchage for a normal cab.
There's also some safety issues with private cars picking up from roadsides, particularly near the roundabout. Unwilling to park and pay the fee, people will collect friends and relatives illegally, and the combination of speeding taxis, cars pausing in roadways and passengers walking around is not a good one for safety. Alternatively, they will park on the pickup area, clogging up the smooth flow.
Supposedly it's a security issue, preventing private vehicles from being left unattended near the terminal, but I also think airport management is out to squeeze every dollar they can from people using the terminal.
Hiring a car is a good idea, if you know Canberra or you are happy with a GPS guiding you through the various roadworks and roundabouts.
Using the Airport shuttle bus is also recommended. The more people using it on its fifteen minute shuttle, the better. Reduces a cabbie's income even further, but from a public transport point of view it's vastly more efficient.
I don't enjoy the airport as much as I used to, now that the cabyard has been moved away from the tarmac. It used to be a lot of fun to look over at Fairbairn to check out whatever exotic birds were camped at the RAAF terminal. Visiting heads of state, international flights diverted from Sydney, military craft - all sorts of things.
Not to mention the B737s parking with their noses almost poking through the fence to the cabyard, and the Dash-8s powering up and whipping around just metres away.The new cabyard is a desolate area of bollards and potholes between the construction zone and the open air carpark.
