Well it was that time of the year again, with a visit to the New Zealand Parking Association conference, this time held in Wellington. I have to take my hat off to the organisers as they tried to improve the programme offerings with a more rounded selection i.e. not just about Enforcement.
The programme had Auckland Transports' Scott Ebbett and Liz Hogan covering off Parking Design and the Baycorp trial. We also had some great stuff from a comedian in the morning on the last day to break up the fare. Well done to Kevin Nally's team.
I presented a subject close to my heart, 'How to reform, transform and preform Council parking'. I have attached a link to prezi.com, the first tie I have used software like this. It was very simple after I had checked and re-checked the Internet link many times. You can find my presentation here.
Ok NZPA, lets make sure you keep improving. Parking is not just wardens and infringements. I noted there was no one from the airport, hospital, hotel, property or valet parking industries and a no show from Secure Parking, Wilson Parking nor Care Park, that I noticed. The latter two having an office in Wellington. The equipment displays were also smaller than usual. I suggest this is because of the lack of decision makers attending.
I will look for ward to seeing the new programme from the new committee and hope they use overseas conventions as a good guide in future.
Kevin Warwood
These comments are my own.
Saturday, September 28, 2013
Retail Parking …….. It shows no one is 'getting it' ....... yet.
Retail parking is all about
capacity, which directly relates to footfall.
You can even work out average spend per car and per car park.
All of these views, including
the British Parking assoc, are commenting and making suggestions on physical
asset design, not parking operations design.
This means that if you have 100 spaces in a mall, and you overfill them,
no one will enjoy the experience but more importantly, you don't increase footfall, and therefore revenues in the mall. This
is the norm for malls. By comparison if you have 50
spaces on-street (normally much less capacity) then the local shops are suffering
through a lack of footfall.
An answer is to increase the
turnover to achieve a desired occupancy rate over a period of the day to make
the car parks as productive a possible, for as long as possible. This means the price might need to change a
couple of times a day to encourage shopping in the High St at shoulder times, by
price or time restriction (just means revenue comes through Enforcement not
Operations).
A key understanding is that if you have 100 spaces and there are 150 cars seeking a spot, you still only have 100 shoppers, not 150....so why overfill them? Conversely, if you have if you only have 50 cars, the parking operation is equally as badly run.
The parking operation needs to
be designed to allow for as many shopping parking opportunities as possible
without having restrictions set too short or too long or prices too high or
low. This might take some trial and error.
Once the best mix of price
and/or restriction is found, to achieve 85% occupancy, then you need to work on
increasing capacity, which is an asset issue, not a parking issue.
When everyone understands the
science behind it, the issue is depoliticised as the emotion is removed, and it becomes an economics issue …
where it should be.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/eric-pickles-calls-for-more-town-centre-parking-spaces
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