Dear motorway service designers,
Why do you want to make our lives so unnecessarily complicated and miserable?
We need a break from driving on a motorway, not an extended go-kart track with poor signage. Why do you think the best way to direct cars and lorries to separate parking areas is tiny arrows designed to blend into the background and impossible to see clearly for anyone without telescopic vision?
And why is the car park bound by a complex and unclear one way system through narrow lanes framed with tyre-scraping concrete kerbs, that dictates we have to drive past several empty spaces before being allowed to park? A place that serves only two groups of people - drivers and drivers on foot - yet provides little to no consideration for pedestrians?
There's little improvement once we get inside, if we can manage that through the choice of 'indirect route through a glass box that leads everyone to walk into each other', or 'heavy door that requires the full exertion of two adults to prise it ajar'. The first thing that everyone wants to do is go to the toilet - so why is that always positioned the furthest from the front door? You seem to have taken design notes from airports, where we're also required to navigate every shop in the place before being allowed to sit down and rest for a moment. Would shops really run out of business if people weren't physically forced to step foot in them?
Things aren't much better once we get into the toilets. They might be dirty or inexplicably beneath a millimetre of water, but at least they're outfitted with the latest in innovative and confusing tap and hand drier technology. Why operate something with a button or a handle when you can spend several minutes waving your hands futilely beneath a sensor before realising it's not working?
And when we leave, why do we have to follow a route so complex that a map is required? A route that starts by heading in the opposite direction to the motorway, then goes through the lorry park (which you so carefully made car drivers avoid on the way in), round the back of several houses, across a large open space confusingly dotted with worn road markings where other traffic could appear from any direction, through at least one inexplicable roundabout, and - I kid you not (M1 Toddington I'm looking at you) - a tunnel??
Driving on a motorway is exhausting and depressing enough already. Services are supposed to be a break from that, not simply a change of gear. Replace all the signs and road markings on the way in with two massive arrows with 'cars' and 'lorries' written on them, ditch the one way system in the carpark, take the front doors out and just make the opening as wide as possible, and draw a big coloured line on the floor from the front door to the toilets.
Yours sincerely,
Drivers