Minimum to park and pick up at McCarran goes up to $2

By Richard N. Velotta

Saturday, April 24, 2010 | 2:01 a.m.

The days when locals could spend less than $2 to park in McCarran International Airport’s short-term lot have ended.

Until April 6, coin parking meters had to be fed — and many locals were able to get in and out by dropping just one quarter — or none at all.

Some motorists waited near their vehicles, keeping a watchful eye for meter cops while guiding arriving passengers to them. Or they found meters still ticking with enough time to run into the terminal and find their passengers.

In a worse-case scenario, they might plunk two or three quarters into the meter if they needed to spend a little extra time inside the terminal or if the meter cop was breathing down their necks.

But now every motorist going into the lot must pull a time-stamped ticket at an entrance gate. In coming weeks, McCarran will roll out its marketing of the system as “McCarran Express Exit” where you “park, pay, drive away.”

The minimum charge: $2.

“This is ridiculous!” Pahrump resident Darlene Borgman said when the new system caught her by surprise last week. “They must really be hurting for money.”

She parked for 13 minutes while picking up a friend. Under the old system, 10 minutes would have cost a quarter; 20 minutes, 50 cents.

In short-term lots on floors 1 and 2M in the parking garage, rates are $2 for the first 60 minutes, $4 for one to two hours, $6 for two to three hours and $3 for each additional hour. The daily maximum charge is $36 and if you lose your ticket, the minimum charge is $36.

McCarran still has long-term parking on floors 1M, 3, 4, 5 and 6 where the rates are $2 for the first 30 minutes, $3 for 31 minutes through an hour and $1 for each additional hour. The daily maximum is $14, which is also the lost-ticket minimum charge.

For the long-term floor, the system should be an improvement during the airport’s busiest times because cars can move out of the garage faster than a booth attendant could.

And to be fair, some people may like the new system in short-term parking — people who go into the terminal and wait for flight arrivals, those who wait with passengers for their luggage, those who need to assist their arrivals, for example. With the new system, they don’t have to overfeed their parking meters to play it safe, or worry about getting a parking ticket by cutting it too close.

On the passenger pickup level of the garage, when motorists are ready to leave, they can insert their tickets into one of 16 kiosks across the street from passenger pickup. The machines calculate the parking charge and, depending on the machine, take payment either by charge card and debit card, or by cash.

Anyone who forgets or chooses not to pay at the kiosks has to use the credit card readers at the exit gates.

The new “everybody pays, even in short-term” system highlights something that McCarran, the second-busiest airport in the nation in terms of passenger traffic, has lacked for too long. Many airports have lots near terminals where locals can park and wait for arriving passengers to give them a cell phone call when they are at the curb.

Such a system has numerous benefits:

• It minimizes unnecessary traffic at the pickup curb.

• It saves fuel and creates less air pollution because motorists don’t have to orbit the terminal clogging up the circulation roads.

• It saves locals time and money parking in short-term parking.

It also keeps tempers in check. Complaints abound about the surliness of curb attendants who have short counts on motorists’ lingering waiting for passengers. That may be McCarran’s worst public contact point, at that arrival curb, and it’s residents who are abused. A holding zone could help fix that.

One thing a holding zone for pickups won’t do is generate parking revenue. That’s probably why McCarran has yet to add one. The airport recently had a perfect opportunity to include a holding lot as part of the design of the new Terminal 3, but didn’t.

A version of this story appears in this week’s In Business Las Vegas, a sister publication of the Sun.