This is my mobility parking permit.

It’s plastic, really hard to lose, lasts for five years and cost fifty dollars. Bargain, eh? It was one of the easier things to put in place to assist me with mobility. All it took was a letter from the doctor and an application form to CCS, and it arrived in the post a week later. The permit allows me to use about fifty mobility parks around the city. Mostly this feels like plenty, though at certain times and in certain locations, it feels like there aren’t nearly enough.

Wellington City Council gives orange tag holders an hour of free parking, plus a little extra time on top of the stated limits. This means it’s not extortion every time I need to park for an hour or two in the city. I’ve also found that the parking wardens are pretty generous with me, and I think this is because of the permit. Except that time I parked in a bus stop by mistake and got towed. Oops.

I often see people without a permit in mobility parks, and it really cheeses me off. It makes a huge difference to be able to park close to where I’m going. If I’m really sore, one or two hundred metres extra walking is the difference between going to the pool or going home. Or, more commonly, it means using up two extra spoons I had reserved for finishing a blog post later. There often is another park, but I don’t think people really understand the difference that distance makes. They certainly don’t consider it when they’re parking in a mobility spot “just for a few minutes”.

My current bug-bear, though, is Countdown in Newtown, the one with all those delightful pictures of shiny white shoppers on the outside. Their mobility parks start moderately close to the entrance to the escalator, though nowhere near the lifts that most disabled people would have to use. They then proceed to get further and further away from the door, until the last spots reserved are in the back row of parking. I’ve raised this with their management three times now; they blame it on the building owner. I’m thinking of implementing some kind of embarrassing Facebook campaign.

I shouldn’t grumble too much, though. Most of the time, mobility parking is brilliant, and allows me to do things that I wouldn’t otherwise be able to do. Like today, when I could park right outside the swimming pool in Kilbirnie (kill Bernie), and just around the corner from my meeting on Featherston Street. Ergo, this blog post was brought to you by Wellington City Council, CCS, and everyone who didn’t park in the mobility spot on Grey Street. Thanks guys.

PS.I am a bit better at parking now. But only a little bit.