Okay, maybe the newly remodelled Westfield Doncaster Shoppingtown (you can Google it if you care; I’m not going to give them a link) is cool inside. I wouldn’t have any way of knowing. I lost an hour of my life and a fair amount of petrol there and never even got close to going inside. I will not be returning, which is a shame, because we used to go there frequently and I really enjoyed it. However, what I experienced today is not something I want to risk experiencing ever again.

Anyway, we went in the afternoon, after what should have been the lunchtime rush. Yes, I know it’s a couple weeks to Christmas and things are busy busy busy. I get that. I’m not fussed about that, I mean, I get that you go somewhere, you see there’s not really any hope of parking, and you go elsewhere. Fine, I do that all the time.

However, what happened to us today was we drove around (painfully slowly) for about twenty minutes and then said, “Well, look, we’re not going to find anywhere to park, let’s go,” and then spent another forty minutes trying to get the hell out of the carpark. Yes, really. For a while, we were so badly gridlocked that we actually turned the engine off for periods of time while waiting to be able to proceed. Furthermore, there were a lot of cars that were parked completely illegally (when I see that, I really want to just get out my keys and walk along scoring the paint on every damned one of them). The illegal parking just contributed to the gridlock, as it turned what should have been a two lane channel into a single lane. Oh, and there was a whole big area of parking that was blocked off from use. Why? Well, there was a non-existent car wash there. Seriously. Reserved for a car wash that did not exist.

So, basically, it was an hour of my life that I’ll never get back. Wasted petrol, wasted time, by the time we finally got the hell out of there, my blood sugar was very low (we were planning on having a late lunch… we ended up going elsewhere and having a very late lunch, indeed), and one of the kids was complaining that she needed to go to the toilet.

The thing that really irritates me is the incredibly poor design of the parking garage. The parking aisles all exit to a single lane to get to the exit. I have to wonder if the engineers who created this mess have ever actually parked a car on a busy day? Hey, I bet it looked great on paper and blueprints, but in practical application it SUCKS. Poor design irritates me beyond belief. I mean, this was a $600million remodel, and it took a couple of years to complete, and yet they think that “state of the art parking” means a multi-level rat warren of painfully slow moving traffic and – wait for it – you pay for your parking! (Happily, you only pay after the first two hours. This is good, because it could take you that long just to find a parking place at all, or to decide you won’t find one and try to leave.)

Unbelievably bad design. I don’t care how much they brag about it, it sucks. I wish I could grab all the design engineers and all of the upper management and stick them in cars and make them drive around that hell hole for an hour or so.

I used to think that the parking situation at Chadstone was really bad, and it kind of is. You can drive around a long time before you find a place to park. But the thing is, you don’t sit in a gridlock for the better part of an hour. I have now elevated Westfield Doncaster to the worst parking situation I’ve experienced in Australia (that’s ten years of living here and visiting a lot of parking garages, including in the heart of the city, multiple suburbs, and at very busy times of the year, indeed!). In fact, come to think of it, it may be the worst parking situation I’ve ever experienced. The only worse one I can think of would be something like leaving a parking lot after some event (concert, for example), when everyone’s trying to go at once, but that’s about volume, not about incredibly poor design (which the owners are bragging about as if it’s great!)

As I said, I won’t be back. It’s a real shame, because it looks like the internal remodel is pretty cool, but honestly, if you can’t get in to see, what’s the point? I can’t be bothered. I’m sure that after the holidays the traffic will be better, but do I want to risk it? Nup. Plenty of other shopping centres in Melbourne, ones where even if I can’t find a place to park, I can at least leave without being gridlocked for the better part of an hour. Poor design, frustrating experience, I’ll take my money somewhere else. (I doubt very much that the management of Westfield will ever read this, much less care what I wrote, but I wanted to write it just in case anyone else felt the same way and wanted to read my rant.)

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