No, you can’t park curbside at KCI anymore. That’s part of having a big-boy airport | Opinion

Deep breaths, people. Of course humans need to vent their frustrations; this is why God invented Twitter, and the opinion page.

But to all of those upset that pickup at Kansas City International Airport isn’t what it used to be, well, part of getting a big-boy airport is having to behave at pickup as if you were at any other airport in any other grown-up city in the world.

So no, you can’t just drive up and sit there, which in airport lingo is known as standing. Curbside parking was never OK, and now is no longer possible.

Because here’s the thing: Others, it turns out, also want to pick up their friends and family members, so the courteous as well as the only practical thing to do is to check, before you leave home, to make sure your party’s flight is on time.

Wait in the cellphone lot until the person you’re collecting really is waiting outside for you.

Then, drive around, scoop them up and off you go. Or, if they’ve wandered away, drive around again, just like you’d have to do anywhere except Kansas City.

(As a study aid, pretend for a minute that you’re picking Grandma up at LaGuardia or O’Hare or LAX. How long do you think you’d be able to sit in an “arrival” lane there before being moved along?)

This is only hard because we’ve been spoiled by the lack of consistent enforcement in years past. And we agree that KCI should have done more to alert the public that this was about to change, instead of pretending that they’d been enforcing the rules all along. No, they haven’t.

But now that we can no longer practically drive right on up to the runway, which was never safe from a security standpoint, it’s past time for us to adapt.

Those complaining that congestion in the pickup line is terrible are not wrong that the current situation is an old-fashioned mess.

One such tweet from last week: “At least a half mile line waiting in standstill traffic to enter the airport and pick people up right now. What a disaster. Terrible design, and no one is forcing drivers to make loops and/or go to the cell lot. Draft is going to be a NIGHTMARE there. Will be an absolute zoo.”

Another: “I went to pick up a friend last night for a 12:32 AM late arrival. This was my view trying to get from the cell phone lot to the terminal. Took me 15-20 mins to get from here to pick up friend. SO many people parked curbside and the cops there were doing seemingly nothing.”

But pssst, the problem really isn’t the design, or even the do-nothing cops; it’s the drivers.

The solution is in our own hands, and those of our neighbors.