Winging It: Questions over airport's cell-phone parking lot

Last week's column on efforts to provide a better cell-phone lot for drivers headed to Philadelphia International Airport brought a spirited response, including questions over whether it's really dangerous to park on the airport ramps from I-95.

More about the safety question momentarily, but first let me round up readers' thoughts.

Several people recounted their efforts to find the airport's current designated cell-phone lot on Bartram Avenue, and agreed that directional signage to it is inadequate.

One reader made an excellent point: She can't find a street sign saying "Bartram Avenue" at the traffic signal where the exit from southbound I-95 dumps traffic onto Bartram. That, no doubt, has added to the confusion of many people trying to find the lot, which technically is a PennDot park-and-ride lot.

Others are perplexed why many people can't find the current cell-phone lot, or don't want to use it. According to those readers, good directions are on the airport's Web site, and once you're at the lot, it's not such a bad place to wait for arriving passengers.

Another caller, responding to my suggestion of looking for empty hotel or office-building parking lots if you can't find the park-and-ride lot, didn't think that was good advice. She said when her husband tried that in a hotel parking lot, employees wouldn't allow it.

That could happen to anyone, of course, since you would be on private property. But the fact is, there is lots of pavement around the airport, on streets and off of them, where no one will bother you.

The safety-related messages I received raised legitimate questions. They challenged the use by me and other reporters of the word "dangerous" to describe the practice of motorists' parking on the I-95 ramps rather than going to the cell-phone lot or airport parking garages.

Have there been fatalities or injuries caused by parking on the ramps, they asked. Isn't this actually an airport entrance road and not an interstate highway ramp? Why don't police enforce a low speed limit and allow drivers to use the shoulders as a cell-phone waiting area?

I asked the Philadelphia and state police for recent statistics on accidents on the ramps but didn't give them much time before my Friday deadline. If I get the numbers, I will put them online.

But I know what prompted the Philadelphia police captain who commanded the airport unit to contact The Inquirer in 2004, asking us to consider writing a story about the "safety issue" of parking on the I-95 ramps.

In my story, published May 26, 2004, Capt. Dominic Mingacci said that in the first five months of that year, there had been 11 accidents involving cars pulling from the shoulders into approaching traffic.

Two of the accidents involved life-threatening injuries, and one involved a marked police car being rear-ended when it stopped to issue a ticket, Mingacci said.

After that, it never seemed important to keep a tally of accidents or ask if parking on the ramps was still a safety issue, although the media should have asked why the police did not devote more manpower to ticketing drivers over the years.

I asked Catherine Rossi, the AAA Mid-Atlantic motor club's spokeswoman, for her group's opinion on parking on the ramps. AAA has criticized the signage directing drivers to the cell-phone lot as inadequate and supports stricter enforcement. Here are the key points Rossi made in an e-mail message:

"Motorists on the side of the road are basically sitting ducks [with no way out and no time to really react to another vehicle]," she wrote. "Ramps are especially dangerous because of curves in the road and shifting speeds of vehicles. Imagine a driver pulling out when other vehicles are exiting the ramp at varying speeds. It's a crash waiting to happen."

So there is a good reason it's illegal to stop on an exit ramp of any interstate highway, except in an emergency. Someone besides the media thinks it is dangerous.

Last month, I told you about efforts to get Congress to pass legislation setting limits on how long airline passengers can be left stranded on airport taxiways. Last week, the Radnor-based Business Travel Coalition, which had agreed in the past with airlines that strict rules on long delays would not solve the problem or please all customers, shifted its position and joined the call for legislation.

The coalition, which represents corporate travel departments, released the results of a survey it took of industry professionals and individuals that showed strong support for congressional action. (Read the results here.)

The coalition, along with FlyersRights.org, the main group pushing the legislation, scheduled a "Passenger Rights Stakeholders Hearing" of their own for Sept. 22 on Capitol Hill. I will report more on the overall effort next week.