An Arabian Tarriance

Hi everyone,

After 3 years away in the Middle East, I’m back in New Zealand and back in the Parking Business again.  It was an education in the Middle East and over the next few weeks, I will detail some of the things I saw and learned while I was away.  Its sufficient to say that they do things differently there!

I managed Queen Alia International Airport parking while in Jordan.  Unknown to most Antipodeans, this is the number 1 airport in the region.  Yes, better rated than Dubai and wrangling for top spot with Abu Dhabi Airport.  QAIA were number 1, knew it and wanted to keep it that way.  The attention to detail and concentration on customer journeys was well known because of the stream of other airports visiting the site to see what they were doing so well.  QAIA parking was good.

I also spent time managing the car parking at King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.  Not as efficient as their middle eastern cousins when it came to understanding how parking worked, how it linked into the passengers journey and how to optimise the resource.  A lot of the issues were the way the management and the procurement processes worked in the Kingdom.  This is a storyt for another time.

I’m happy to hear from all of the readers of this blog and its good to be home.

Kevin

Auckland Airport's Futuristic Dreams

You are flying to Asia. You drive, perhaps by driverless car, to Auckland Airport, parking at the new multi-storey car park connected to the terminal. You check your bags in at the car park.

You read that right. Car park check-in. It's all part of a 30-year, multi-million-dollar vision - including a new runway, a railway terminal and hotels which will see more planes, more travellers, more retail shops, restaurants and bars, giving the airport the presence of a sophisticated precinct.

There will be heavy emphasis on comfort, convenience and what business jargon labels "a seamless experience" for travellers, with the airport of the future uniquely Kiwi in design, architecture, food and drink and shopping.

Checking in at the car park, likely to be achieved by 2022, is just part of that seamlessness as the airport prepares to meet the next wave of growth in tourism to New Zealand and of Kiwis flying overseas for business or pleasure (up by 5 per cent this year, according to official statistics).

Tourism, already overtaking dairy as our biggest industry with more than 3 million visitors and a spend now surpassing $10 billion, is poised to get even bigger, as Graham Matthews, general manager Airport Development & Delivery, illustrates: "We are currently handling just over 17 million trips a year, counting all arrivals and departures. By 2040, that will have grown to well over 40

million.  About 75 per cent of all trips into New Zealand come through Auckland.

"We might hit 25 million trips by 2025 - potentially sooner, given we are currently looking at around 8 per cent growth for this year. Furthermore, research shows that by 2030 almost 80 per cent of the world's middle classes - including the growing middle classes in China, India and South America - will be one plane trip away from New Zealand."

"That's a huge opportunity for New Zealand tourism. That's why Auckland airport has been working in with Tourism New Zealand and airlines on a travel, trade and tourism partnership which has encouraged a lot more airlines to fly here."

Matthews says future possibilities can be seen by looking at Ireland: "the same sort of land mass as us, an island like us, the same sort of population but four times the number of visitors, managed well and sustainably so the product doesn't get ruined."

The first phase of Auckland Airport's expansion is already under way: "It's the first of the building blocks over the next 18 months; it'll see our international emigration expanded, further streamlining customers' passage through security, with more retail shops and new seating areas.

"Then we will be adding more gates so we can park the increasing number of planes flying here. That will be completed by the end of 2018; the next big project will be a new domestic terminal joined to the international terminal - scheduled for 2022."

Further on, by 2044 and beyond, other plans for the airport include:

• better road and public transport links

• a rapid transit network, including space for a railway station

•a second runway and proposed extension

So when that traveller electronically checks in baggage at the multi-storey car park, he is beginning a process designed not just to smooth his way but to provide a sense of comfort and entertainment - making the airport far more a part of a holiday, for example, than it has been in the past.

"Streamlining is hugely important, of course, to cater for expected growth and enhance the travelling experience," says Richard Barker, the airport's general manager retail & commercial. "It's also a question of developing amenities like retail shops, restaurants and bars, so we capture the best of New Zealand and the best of the world in a Kiwi airport environment - unlike some airports round the world, where you could be anywhere."

New Zealand is not the only country gearing up for tourism growth. Global tourism is expected to increase by almost 4 per cent this year while retail shopping at airports is also a growing phenomenon.

Research by UK retail consultancy Verdict suggests the global airport retail market will near US$60 billion by 2019 - nearly 73 per cent higher than actual receipts in 2013. They say the increase will be stimulated by growing numbers of passengers and increasing prosperity in emerging markets pushing up traveller spend.

European airports like Vienna, Frankfurt, London's Stansted and many others are boosting food & beverage and shopping areas; Stansted has completed a $175m upgrade to increase space in the departure lounge and provide more shops to feed demand.

Barker says the airport is working hard, even as Phase 1 building is under way, to boost satisfaction levels and has already enhanced the retail presence airside: "We are already the biggest shopping mall in New Zealand on a sales per metre basis - more than Sylvia Park, although they beat us on actual volume.

"We are introducing building up a selection that outstrips what is available in 'high street' Auckland - like our Victoria's Secret outlet, New Zealand handbag label Saben, fashion label Ruby plus outlets like Benefit, Keihls, Urban Decay, Jo Malone and more."

Ranking New Zealand Council's Parking

After attending a recent New Zealand Parking Conference this (southern) spring, I was heartened to see that some Councils are working diligently toward a new future well with a much deeper knowledge of how parking contributes to the vitality of a city or town.  They are taking on board the fast intrusion of new the technologies with the enthusiasm of a kid with that latest fishing rod - they know its god but are not quite sure how to get the best out of it.  The strides new technology is making to parking around the world are immense and permanent. It is not the same business it was 10 or even 5 years ago.

Some Councils are progressing faster than others, and their cities and towns are benefiting from the support to their economic vitality a modern parking system can provide.  But we don’t know who these Councils are as there has been no way to measure how all Councils are doing against each other and against the major players in the market.  We can’t tell how or if a city's and town's parking resources are benchmarked against the rest and how they are actually being managed.   But we can now….sort of.

Benchmarking is not a dirty word, for obvious improvement and quality reasons.  Also since the national environment is now ranking everything such as schools and District Health Board services, it seems like a natural progression that we should rank our Council parking systems.  As Councils collectively around the country manage a staggeringly large number of car parks for their communities and take in a large amount of parking revenue, there is a very real opportunity to manage this resource in a manner that provides positive returns to the businesses, the community and the ratepayers by simply doing things better and learning off those who do it better.  So why not rank them!

 Those in the best space to understand what Councils are doing in the field of technology and modern parking methodologies are the service providers.  They will visit each Council and talk to them at events like conferences, where they can form an opinion on how disposed each Council seems to improving what they are providing.  So we surveyed them.

 The results of the survey, conducting shortly after the New Zealand Parking Association conference has been positive in that most respondents wanted the outcomes to be aimed at improvement.  I need to say that very few of the comments were negative, which is a great place for the industry to start.

 Also please note that these companies did NOT want to do this openly for obvious reasons.

 The questions had not been split between the parking operations and the parking enforcement wings of Councils as some of the smaller Councils don’t split the two specialties anyway.

The questions that were asked were to provide an opinion on how each Council appeared in,

·         OPENNESS TO TRY new parking systems
·         UNDERSTAND new parking systems, methodologies and technologies
·         STAY INFORMED about new parking systems, methodologies and technologies
·         Offer VALUE for parking spend by Councils
·         Appear to be well CONTROLLED & ORGANISED

 All of these questions were asked from the perspective of someone who views most Councils and in some cases can review New Zealand’s Councils against world standards.

Results

The results show some interesting features, namely that when the results are marked out of a possible 4, the industry average is 2.4 which means that most of the City Council portion of the parking industry is above or close to average.  We’re not sure if this is a good result or not but as time goes on, we can view the trends to see if our Councils are improving their service offer.  I suspect that if I was facing ratepayers and businesses that I would want my parking operation to be supporting economic vitality and community access with much more than an average result!

A handful of Councils have achieved above a 75% result in the opinion of the respondents.  It’s probably not a coincidence that these organisations have a very proactive and positive approach to what parking may deliver to their city, Auckland Transport recently completing its Draft Unitary Plan, Christchurch City recently completed its new Central City Parking Plan and Rotorua experimenting with solutions around its retail parking.

Honourable mentions go to Invercargill City Council who respondents say asked some good questions of the survey contributors at conference and New Plymouth City Council who are also spending time on trying to get their solutions right for the community.

Some of the responses have been interesting, when asked for some simple thoughts.  A collection of those are below,

1.       What best describes the biggest issue you have with Councils parking teams?

·         Operations oriented (as in council centric) rather than customer oriented.

·         The linking of vehicle sensing technologies with customer parking payment solutions. The 2 do not need to be linked.

·        Budget. The old adage "you get what you pay for" very much applies here.       Also, an inability or unwillingness to hold suppliers accountable for poor         product/service supplied.

·         Lack of understanding when it comes to technology.

·   Difficult to access a decision maker, and council officers pretend they are  decision makers.

·        No issues.

·    They do not understand how technology can manage utilisation. Only pay lip  service to this.

·         Wasteful procurement methods.

·         Tender process too long.

·         Lack of general computer knowledge.

2.        What is the biggest change you would like Councils to make to improve their parking value offer to their city or town?

·         Raise the price of parking and use time variable price parking so that there is always some proportion (say15%) available parking.
·         A more aggressive approach to encouraging the uptake of Smartphone solutions for payment of parking by customers.
·         Directed enforcement will provide the opportunity to achieve optimal compliance/turnover. Increase the infringement fees too - they simply are not a deterrence.
·         Use the data from technology to improve the customer experience, determined planning.
·         Think like business people instead of just bums on seats.
·         Make on-street parking more affordable with shorter time limits then utilise major car parks for longer term use.  On-street short stay, off-street long stay.
·         Focus on utilisation not revenue. Abolish the tender system and let cities chose providers as the private sector would.
·         Improve their procurement practices to stop wasting money.
·         More openness to new technologies.
·         Internal training improved.

Conclusion

Parking is always an emotional topic when it actually doesn’t need to be.  It is generally simple economics, supply v demand.  As an industry it has had a ‘state-control like’ price structure for decades, which is why many people do not respect the industry – they don’t see the value in it like it was a market priced litre of fuel.  It is also touched on the periphery by many and varied people, occupations and activities that don’t understand how scientific it has actually now become.

It is clear that the Council parking industry in New Zealand needs to improve, as measured by the respondents to this survey, but the average is not bad.  We suspect that the ratepayers and communities of New Zealand would also see improvement as a necessary step for vote ratepayer funds.   We hope the Councils take this information as a positive opportunity.

Parking is not going to get any less important over the next 30 years and with some Councils looking to maintain their current vehicle loads and to mode change the growth from now and into the future from petrol to electric.  It is clear we need to better understand how to control and manage that contribution that Council parking makes to each city.

Kevin Warwood

How to Park like the New Zealand All Blacks

Watching the mighty All Blacks beat the USA rugby team at Chicago in November made me think about how this team has become one of the most successful sports teams the world has ever seen.  The ‘All Blacks’ (reference to the colour of their uniform) are the national rugby team of New Zealand, and even taking into account the fact that there are only 4.5 million people in New Zealand, their achievements on the world stage and against much larger countries, have been mind-bogglingly successful.

To give you some idea of their stature, over the 144 years rugby has been played in New Zealand and the 130 years the All Blacks have been playing other countries, they have only ever been beaten by 5 countries, won 400 of their 524 games played at a win rate of 76%.  As of September 2014 this year, they are on a streak that includes 20 games in a row unbeaten and 36 games unbeaten at home, all against tier one international teams and in some hostile environments from Johannesburg to Buenos Aeries and now London to Chicago.  They became the first rugby nation in the professional era to achieve a 100% winning record in a calendar year.

 It’s difficult to compare their success because of subjectivity but records show some of the best local and international teams of all time are,

Win % Wins    Losses Year                Team   Comment

.764     400      124      1884-2014       NZ National All Blacks Rugby

.673     70        34        1914-2014       Brazil National Soccer Football

.878     72        10        1995–96          Chicago Bulls  best 82-game season

.825     60        8          1976–77          Montreal Canadiens

.798     67        17        1880                Chicago White Stockings

How do you create a winning team like the All Blacks?  How does an organisation go out to fashion a record almost unmatched around the world for any local or international sporting team, over such a long period?  I have tried to put down on paper a few of the immediately obvious traits that the All Black organisation clearly used to their benefit and these traits can be transposed over to a commercial parking organisation.

Talent

The definition of talent is a natural aptitude or skill.  I don’t believe this.  I believe talent comes from hard work and years of preparation.  You may have heard of the 10,000 hours (Malcolm Gladwell) it comes to becoming an expert.  Take Tiger Woods, he achieved expert status probably by the time he was 5-7 years old, and today that would be Lydia Ko. 

Access to or attracting the best talent is a major challenge for any organisation, but for one that has its eyes on being world class, it needs the best talent on board, with the best talent coming through in a wave right behind, pushing standards higher and higher.

To test this I went through a number of parking job vacancies online to check out what the vital and typical skill or talent was that if in abundance in your organisation, would transform you into a world class parking outfit.  There are no single set of skills that makes a parking person like accounting makes an accountant or law makes a lawyer.  Organisations have advertised for public administration, business administration, engineering, Bachelor Science, Bachelor Arts, or ANY 4 year degree.  To cloud the water even more, for my team here, I look for economics skills – the balance of supply & demand must be understood as a priority.  You can sub-contract the other skills.

Maybe identifying talent young, with basic skill sets and investing in them until they become world class is a way to improve your business. I don’t know of any parking company that does that.

Clarity of Purpose

The structure must be set to be focussed on ONE goal, success.

 The All Blacks are blessed with a structure in New Zealand where every town has a rugby club.  When New Zealand was being developed in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the rugby club was the place where all of the farmers and town folk would meet up.  It was like the town hall and so the game spread around the country.  Today you could not replicate that infrastructure simply.  Most sports organisations short circuit that process by having commercial relationships with other clubs around the world.  Parking companies should look at something similar to extend their influence and to access resources limited in their own environment.

The New Zealand Rugby Union controls ALL rugby in the country.  Every town has a team, every suburb or region has a representative team, every region flows into a provincial team and 26 provinces in New Zealand form the five Super Rugby franchises that compete with teams other countries that go from South Africa, Asia, Australia, New Zealand to Argentina … the long way around!  Each of these franchises from New Zealand form the All Blacks.  With that pyramid structure, it’s easy to see how THE single goal of a small country is a winning national rugby team.

Many companies including parking companies do not know what their single goal is and in not knowing that goal, they can’t organise themselves to achieve it in a world class fashion.  The All Blacks organise themselves to win international rugby matches better than anyone else in the world, what does your parking company do?

Complete Trust

 The management structure of the New Zealand Rugby Union gives the right to organise and run the rugby programme of the All Blacks to the All Blacks management.  They understand that the coach and players are the experts and will get it right.  Rugby Union focus is on supporting the team through good times and bad.  They trust completely that the team is doing the right things to achieve its goals.

How may cities, councils and perhaps companies trust their teams to get the job done?  An example of this is when the Councillors, Mayor or even the CEO give direction of operational matters like pricing.  Operational matters belong to operations and in this case the All Black team.  You wouldn’t hear of the Union instructing the All Blacks on tactics.

A Healthy Impatience

With a positive and achieving culture, supported by a trusting management structure, you can develop a team that pulls together during bad times and still manages to win, even in the last minute of the game.  However, to consistently beat the world, you must get there first.  This means that developing new technologies or new methodologies to operate your car park should be trialled and tested, even if no one else in the world has ever done it before.  Not rushed, just impatient.

Developing a healthy impatience or a positive edginess should be encouraged.  The All Blacks score more points than any opposition, even when they go a player down with a yellow card.  Even when they are 14 on 15 players, their record shows they rise and score more points.  This is a staggering achievement based on a desire to be the best in the world. 

The All Blacks have shown the world that to be world class you have to get a bunch of things right, all at the same time.  They don’t wait for others to achieve, they don’t wait for others to learn how the All Blacks do it and catch up, they keep challenging, testing, trialling, watching, adapting, recruiting, trusting, desiring and building.  Aren’t these traits we want in our business and the industry?

Kevin Warwood

What will you ponder over Christmas???

Things to ponder over Christmas…… 

I note no one has yet tackled the issue of what happens when you send your driverless car to a car park (or home depending on the value of fuel vs. parking costs), after being dropped off, and its full? 

Do you send it to a car park in the same parking company’s livery or will competing parking companies have to speak to each other to communicate vacancies? 

Will the commercial parking companies have to allow vacancy data out for Google, Audi or BMW to use? 

Will pay by Phone companies finally set up a single common ‘wallet’ like Paypal etc so uses don’t have to have 5 Apps on their phone and uptake can be sped up? 

What will you ponder over Christmas???

Have a great Christmas.

Kevin Warwood

Celebrity Complains about a Being Infringed in a Christchurch Car park. (Video)

Gary McCormack Furious About Parking.  The problem is, the car park he is showing in the video is one of the better ones in Christchurch.

Read the Article here .....

Free Parking has Mixed Results on Retail in Nelson

In Nelson, at the top of New Zealand's South  Island or Te Waipounamu (Maori name), there is a hive of activity around trying to solve a main street retail parking problem.  Regularly the sunniest place in New Zealand, the issue is creating chills with some of the abuse hurled at the poor old Enforcement Officers, so much so that nelson may be showing it up as an unfriendly place.  Why?  Because they cant solve their retail parking problems.

Retail parking is a very simple issue to solve.  It’s straight up economics, not emotion, not traffic engineering, not planning, just economics.  It’s the balance of supply and demand.  Whether by time restriction or metered charging, its still just about economics.  This fact eludes most people.

I’m not sure the Council and the retailers have actually defined the issues here, so that would be a great place to start, so I will have a go here. 

1.         Provide enough parking for shopping customers to come and stay as long as they are shopping, and no longer.

2.         Provide some parking for the staff of those shops and commercial premises to park all day.

3.         Its not really a number three but I thought I would throw this in - Council will get its revenues anyway, either by parking meter or by enforcement (due to the extra traffic generated by free parking)….its never free.

There, done it.

Firstly, you have to understand how to manage the parking resource in the city. It is limited. There are only so many car parks to go around.  Generally, more people want them than there are car parks.  This makes it a scarcity so you must actively manage it.  But to what levels should you manage it?

In modern parking methodologies, the ‘occupancy rate’ is the Number 1 KPI in parking now.  You must set up your system to ensure full utilisation of parking, that is a working occupancy rate of around 60% to 85%.  Any higher, then the price should go up to control it (occupancies higher than 85% start to show signs of congestion).  Any lower then the price should go down to improve utilisation. 

There is a large amount of work now showing that people looking for car parks are up to 45% of the actual traffic in a busy city.  The answer to that is to get the pricing or time restriction signals right and then communicate that in depth so that the parking decision is made before you leave home or work.

Price is a tool but not the main goal ….. occupancy is the main goal of retail parking although retailers will try to jam you into their car parks anyway because parking relates directly to footfall and they generally don’t care about you until you get into the mall (see most malls in the country).

These days we have a lot of modern tools & technologies in the tool box to set up a modern parking system, pay and display machines, pay by phone, barrier gates, licence plate readers, parking sensors, signs, paint on the road, education and finally, parking enforcement officers.  You can use some or all of these together.  Taupo uses an enforcement only model, which is say P60-P120 with sensors on the street to keep the cars turned over.  Most big cities will use parking meters and pricing to turn cars over. 

New modern methods of setting up your parking operation work very well around the world and will be in New Zealand in no time, that is an inverse pricing method.  Most cities have a price per hour where each hour costs the same amount, e.g. $3.00 per hour plus a P120 time limit.  The new approach is to charge more for the extra hour and have no time limit.  The affect appears to be people who want to stay can – they don’t get forced out – but they must pay for the privilege.  This might look like,

1.         1st Hour - $2

2.         2nd Hour - $3

3.         3rd Hour - $5

4.         4th Hour - $7

As you can see, the rates climb significantly at the time you want to turn the car park over.  It also has the affect of being positive in nature versus the inherently negative enforcement and infringement approach; in fact it is proving around the world to reduce the need for enforcement significantly.

For staff and office workers, they can park in areas away from the parking for shoppers because, for a major proportion of them, if you can’t park shoppers, they wouldn’t have a job.  In this case you make it cheaper or with longer time limits where you want them to park to incentivise them away from the main shopping areas..  You can always improve public transport to incentivise them on to the bus (see my article on TDM here).

See, parking is easy to fix, you just need an economic bent.  Parking is about economics, not only traffic engineering or planning and certainly not just enforcement.  I suggest taking the more positive approach and organise the balance of supply and demand and cut the poor old Enforcement Officers some slack…. It’s the system, not them.

Kevin Warwood

Read the Article Here.....

These views are my own.

BE POSITIVE - DO AWAY WITH TDM

Is TDM designed to cause inefficiencies and now dated?

Most of my ‘parking’ working life has been primarily about trying to optimise a parking operation by getting as many people into a well run and attractive facility as possible.  The single aim has been to achieve a high occupancy level, with a tipping point of too many customers demanding spaces, because the facility’s promotion and operations were too successful, then triggering a price rise.  That tipping point meant I could then put prices up and start the process of marketing all over again.  It doesn’t always work that way because occupancies and prices can go down too. 

This is in a commercial environment and not a municipal environment that may not enjoy the freedoms from community outcomes that private facilities may.  The commercial environment supposes you run each car park as a separate business and not as a single synchronous entity and I have found that this has more pros than cons. 

Transport Demand Management (TDM) is about synchronising not only each individual car park space and facility but each and every part of the transport programme being, Public Transport, Road Corridors and Parking.  This tends to run against the ethos of competition between car park sites and car park companies which means, it is doomed to failure straight away. 

It supposes firstly that all car park companies will work together to achieve the lofty goals of TDM (they wont).  Secondly, it supposes that all parts of the TDM paradigm are working efficiently (they aren’t).  Thirdly, it supposes that TDM will deliver more benefits to the community than competition does (it doesn’t).  TDM could be called a type of socialist transport (tongue in cheek).

I tend to think of TDM as a ‘flow’.  It deals with the flow of people into the city each day, almost like a river.  At its source the river starts quietly, gently working with gravity to go to a destination.  As it picks up volume as more tributaries and estuaries join in, it is squeezed by its banks and forced to go where the banks want it to go.  The river may get a blockage every now, causing all sorts of flooding and chaos, as the river works its way to its destination. It can’t be stopped without major construction or investment.  At the destination the river is large and the combination of the collection of smaller flows, all settle into the vast peaceful ocean. 

Imagine how surprised I was when I started to work in a city environment, being surrounded by traffic engineers and transport planners who spoke about using parking as a transport demand management tool.  To the lay person, this speak means artificially fiddling with the price at a facility or destination to discourage customers to park and to consequently force them to take the bus, train, bicycle or suffer the fake prices.  In other words, they want to dam up the river as it flows to the sea.  Good luck with that.

Being a glass half full person, I could never understand how a city might try successfully to force people to travel by a mode through penalty and punishment rather than the positive outcome of enticement, incentive and motivation.  People will always travel where the incentives point them.  Penalties require enforcement automatically which means there will need to be a large administration of the punitive regime.  Incentives require no such level of administration. 

In Wikipedia, transportation demand management, traffic demand management or travel demand management (all TDM) is the application of strategies and policies to reduce travel demand (specifically that of single-occupancy private vehicles), or to redistribute this demand to other methods of travel.  I get this.  I really do.  This should be about encouraging a different method of travel through incentives, attractiveness of the product and lifestyle or even competing values, not about hitting people over the head with the blunt mallet of pricing for parking. 

In practical terms, this means that if people won’t use the bus service because it is a poor option, then the city will force us to use that bus service by hiking up parking prices by the advent of local taxes, the forced reduction of parking supply or redesigning Road Corridors to make car travel difficult.  Whatever method used, this is not acceptable to most people.

The answer is very simple.  Run an awesome bus and train service, reconfigure the on-street parking to allow for transport options to flow smoothly through the Road Corridors (no on-street parking impediments) and then let parking operations respond to the left-overs in a well run, efficient manner that offers a great service to those who must use a car.  Incentivise those who use Public Transport with a faster, smoother and cheaper service where a person’s time-value is revered.

Symptoms of a poorly run and designed Public Transport system and poorly configured Road Corridors are easy to spot.  They are spiralling parking costs due to rising parking demand, circulating and double parked traffic again due to rising parking demand and Road Corridors at a standstill during the peak hours again due to rising parking demand.  Parking demand is the cleanest method of determining the how well your Public Transport system and Road Corridors are working and thought of by the public.

This is an issue that should be solved in other areas up-stream, such as Road Corridors design and operations or in Public Transport operations, not parking operations.  It feels very much like the upstream road corridor, Public Transport design and traffic operations have not been able to do their jobs well enough and the result is to flush it on to parking operations to clean up!  This is designing a system to run inefficiently on purpose!  A city municipality owes it to the tax payers to run the parking operations well, not to artificially run it poorly …. on purpose.

Another challenge to TDM is the arrival of self driving cars and the now increasing growth of electric vehicles.  Self driving cars may actually double the traffic into the city as the car parking in the city not only competes with the time values of sitting on Public transport, but also the costs of sending a car home or to a cheaper car park lot in the suburbs, awaiting the call to come into the city and pick up the owner. Cars could make four trips a day instead of the current two.  On the other hand, electric vehicles should be encouraged as they don’t bellow greenhouse gases.  TDM is a blunt instrument that will not filter out desired vehicles, rather punish them all, missing the chance to incentivise the right behaviours.

In the coming modern world, congestion charging or road tolling, where road users are charged based on when, where and how much they drive is a better way of controlling the travel demand.  Why?  Because electric vehicle can be singled out as those who can be incentivised to encourage this type of transport while four trip a day self driving cars or fossil fuelled cars will be discouraged. 

However, the best method of encouraging the type of behaviour a city wants is to improve Public Transport, design better Road Corridors and allow the inner city parking stakeholders to compete and be run efficiently.

Be positive, do away with TDM.

Kevin Warwood

Parking Operations Designer

Minister to reform Hospital Parking Rules ........

New guidelines have been drawn up to put an end to the stress of 'unfair' charges

Opinion:  I have to say that if a Hospital hasn’t organised their parking charges yet and grasped how the start of a Hospital visit is not with a Physician but a Parking Attendant yet ……   Readers here know my feelings on this subject.

From the article here that tells us that a Minister of the Crown must force District Health Trusts in the UK (Boards in NZ) to get their parking organised properly and look after the chronically ill and disabled, tells us a lot about the actual Boards and their governance.  They appear to believe that the Hospital only starts at the swoosh of the automatic doors on the front of the building. 

While the patients suffer poorly designed and operated car parks and with contracted operators who take advantage of the lack of oversight, the Trusts (Boards) may wonder why they have a high number of non-appearances or patients worried about their car while they should be worried about their health!

This article is a good reminder to District Health Boards in New Zealand to take the opportunity to get it right before the Minister of Health intervenes.

Article:

Relatives of chronically ill patients must be given free or cheap hospital parking under new rules announced by the Government.

Patients with disabilities and those with frequent appointments as well as staff working shifts will also benefit from the shake-up, according to Jeremy Hunt.

The Health Secretary said new guidelines for English hospitals had been drawn up to put an end to the stress of “unfair” charges.

Read more Here ............

Trial technology for car parks by Smart Parking in Hamilton

Cashless car parking could be on the way for Hamilton.

A trial has started in Grey St, Worley Place and the Riverbank carpark using new sensors that sit under cars.

The sensors, designed by Cambridge company Smart Parking, could lead to a parking system with no roadside payment machines.

Read More Here .......

Christchurch Hospital set to be car-free area soon

New options include security staff acting as valets.

Christchurch Hospital will soon become a car-free zone, but authorities are still deciding how to ferry people to and from the central-city site.

The hospital will lose about 150 car parking spaces when preparation work on the new acute services building starts.

A start date could not be confirmed by Canterbury District Health Board (CDHB), but a hospital committee report stated it would begin on 6^th September 2014.

Read More Here ....

Car park criteria spelt out by council for Blenhiem

Businesses which cannot provide as many car parks as required by council planning rules have two ways of dealing with it, council staff say.

Read More Here .....

Hospitals in England ordered to provide free parking for some patients - UK

New NHS guidelines say priority groups – including certain visitors – should be able park free or pay greatly reduced rates.

Hospitals have been ordered to provide free parking for some patients and visitors under new NHS guidelines announced by the government.

Free or greatly reduced parking space will be given at English hospitals to "priority groups", including visitors with relatives who are seriously ill or are in hospital for a long time. Frequent visitors, people with disabilities and some hospital staff will also have reduced rates.

Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, said: "Patients and families shouldn't have to deal with the added stress of unfair parking charges. These clear ground rules set out our expectations and will help the public hold the NHS to account for unfair charges or practice

Read More Here ....

Auckland Transport takes up the parking challenge

The International Parking Institute – headquartered in the United States – says by embracing technology and forging public-private partnerships, cities can convert long-existing parking issues into models of sustainability, efficiency, revenue generation and customer service.

Auckland Transport (AT) recently released its draft Parking Discussion document with general manager strategy and planning Peter Clark saying it’s the first time parking has been reviewed Auckland-wide.

Read more here ..

Scissors stabbing over parking spot - Sydney

An argument over a parking space in Australia turned violent when a female motorist allegedly slapped a man in the face then stabbed him in the leg with a pair of scissors, police say.

The 21-year-old has been charged with predatory driving and assault occasioning actual bodily harm following the confrontation in Lakemba, south-west Sydney, on Sunday afternoon.

Inspector Ben Hooper, the duty officer at the Campsie local area command, said the woman and a 26-year-old man had argued over who had the right to a parking space on Haldon Street in Lakemba just before 2.30pm.

A short time later the man was driving south along Croydon Street, which runs parallel to Haldon Street, when his car was allegedly bumped from behind by a white Honda Civic.

The man told police that the vehicle belonged to the same woman with whom he had argued a short time earlier.

The man said he followed the Civic to take down its registration number, but witnesses told police the Civic turned around and blocked his car, and the woman got out of her vehicle.

Police allege the woman slapped the man through the open window of his car before assaulting him with a pair of scissors.

"She allegedly punched him a couple of times while holding a pair scissors, which caused some superficial cuts," Inspector Hooper said.

Paramedics treated the man at the scene, but he was not taken to hospital.

Inspector Hooper said tempers had flared earlier over who should have got a public car space along the street. It was not clear who eventually took the spot.

"Situations such as parking spaces should not be causes for violence at all. We just need to be patient with each other on the roads and show some courtesy," he said.

A short time after the stabbing, police went to a house in Kennedy Street in Lakemba and arrested a 21-year-old woman.

She was charged and granted conditional bail to appear in Burwood Local Court on September 16

Parking as a ‘Commodity’? Hmmm...

Is parking a commodity?  If it is then we could manage it better, value it more and it could play a major role in revitalising a city.

The definition of a commodity is a marketable item produced to satisfy wants or needs.  The definition from Wikipedia is a class of goods for which there is demand, but which is supplied without qualitative differentiation across a market. Or in plain terms, a commodity is not a high value product, it is common, in plentiful supply and almost always anyone can provide it. Parking is possibly seen as a commodity.

As in the case of some commodities, the price of parking is also derived from the function of the market, that is, supply and demand in the parking market tends to set the price for parking as one parking operator competes against another parking operator.  In a lot of cities, this rule only applies to some classes of parking, such as off-street parking.  Parking on-street is not competitive in most places and therefore this class of parking is mis-priced and mis-managed.  Parking is seen as a plain, simple, valued but not a valuable product.

So is parking a commodity?  Mostly yes but only in a functioning market place.  In the real world, in some cities, the market is not functioning well and so some cities have too much or too little parking as a result.  It is common, its value is not that high, it is mostly in plentiful supply and there are little or no restrictions to the provision of parking (you need land in the same way you need a factory or farm in the production of other commodities).  In this form, parking is a commodity.  To get the full benefits of a commodity though, that is the right value at the time you purchase or use it, there must be a functioning market and this is where most cities let its constituents down.

The problem is that the major suppliers of parking in a modern world view parking though old glasses.  In city decision making, parking is seen as a capital asset and not as a commodity.  This devalues parking and draws valuable resources to support the wrong activities.  Some cities spend time on major ‘parking plans’ that are all about dealing with parking buildings and assets, but have little interest or knowledge on how to make those assets then work efficiently.  In other words, over simplistically, it is acceptable for those assets to be poorly managed as long as they are in the right place.  For example, a car park is built at a cost of $30m, but its impact on the surrounding retail area will have a positive affect of $160m over its life time, that’s not counting its own revenue or inflation.  Yet the energy expended on getting the building in the right place, how it fits in with other parking resources and how it links into a transport network, is disproportionate to the economic benefits created by the parking operation.  Parking is about car park buildings as much as I-Pods are about the Chinese factory ‘building’ they are made in.  It’s important but not that important.

So what is the benefit of defining parking as a commodity?  It’s not a pork belly or orange juice traded out of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.  It is the moment in time, that people consume, not the piece of turf the car sits on.  When a customer buys parking, they don’t get a piece of tarmac, they get a start time and a finish time. They get the ‘b’ in the ‘a to b’ relationship.  When viewed properly as a commodity, it is a marketable and competed for resource to the benefit of the consumer and supplier. It gets the right ‘value’ attached to it.  Notice here I didn’t say price, but value.  Cities have a history of mis-valuing parking and therefore distorting the market, setting incorrect prices and subsequently creating the wrong supply or demand volume, that is too much parking or too little parking.  Cities have caused the wrong supply of parking because of the mismanagement of the value of parking.  Parking should be marketed as a commodity and allow the market to solve the issues of supply and demand, for the benefit of all.  The market will allow to be built just the right amount of car parks required.

Let’s look at other marketable and competed for resources like a seat on a plane.  A seat on a plane is priced exactly to match its value.  The internet provides many ways to market this commodity these days in fact this is one of the most competitive markets in the world.  You can be on a plane and all of the people surrounding you will have paid totally different prices to be in that seat with you, just so the plane can be filled.  Price is a product of when you purchased the ticket or what time of the day the flight is at.  It has the right value.  The benefit of seeing parking in the same light as the airline industry is that they understand how to utilise the resource.  They have to draw the maximum opportunity out of it to benefit the consumer and the owner.  Having a functioning ‘market’ where parking is competitive and variably priced, ensures just the right amount of parking will be provided, with the right value attached, for the benefit of all.

A market functions well when the supply and demand of the commodity are in relative balance.  If it is out of balance, the market sends signals to the price that the commodity is now more valuable or less valuable.  The affect of this is that the suppliers or consumers then respond by buying or selling or not buying or not selling the commodity, and therefore rebalancing the value.  Most cities don’t allow the market to operate by interfering with supply as this is the only component they can affect, as they can’t affect demand.  So parking is then deliberately mis-valued and mis-priced to drive the outcomes they want.  The result is inevitably traffic jams or streets of vacant car parks, where the ‘goldilocks’ car park is required, that is just the right amount of cars for just the right amount of car parks.

Most cities would love to reduce their reliance on parking and mode-shift to other transport methods such as cycling or public transport.  The method they use is Travel Demand Management.  This is just another tool to interfere in the market.  Colloquially, if the public transport system is set up well with greater worth placed on people’s time in buses than in their cars, and the road corridors are set up to allow for greater worth for peoples time on those corridors than a private vehicle, then far less parking would be needed, other than for community access functions.  Sadly, this is not the case.  Most cities will try to regulate the heck out of the routes, the medium and the destination and force us into a poorly functioning parking provision with artificial prices and over or under supply.

In conclusion, commodities require a market to give them the correct ‘value’ at the time of the sale.  The value of the commodity usually relates to its price.  Many cities interfere in the market and this distortion creates an over or under price and supply. The consequences of that interference is a much longer battle to get mode shifts to other transport choices and a slower revitalisation of the city through increased traffic jams or streets of vacant car parks, neither are good outcomes.  Parking is a commodity that needs a full blown market to benefit us all.

Read the Article Here