Parking Nation Goes Live

Parking Nation is alive ....  And that is probably the worst Dr Frankenstein imitation you will ever hear but the message is the same.   After a lot of work, our Parking Nation website has gone live.  We are covering all of the parking news in New Zealand and funnelling the international news to New Zealand.

Go Parking Nation http://www.parkingnation.co.nz

Parking Cows - What Farmers Know about Parking.

Most lay-people wouldn’t have a clue as to how modern parking is designed and operated today. 

However, those same lay-people will have a very good idea on how to run a farm efficiently and what

happens to the farm and the cows if you are a poor farmer.   

A farmer walks a tightrope to balance the feed the stock might eat with the amount to feed the farm might grow.   It’s a tightrope that a City has to walk as well, balancing the amount of parking opportunities created in a limited number of car parks with the number of cars that want to park in them each day.   

Modern parking now has better ways to operate, especially with the advent of clever technologies and the discovery of the theory of how to operate a city’s parking.  Just like farming, the farmer is always trying to read about the latest techniques and to deploy the latest tractor or irrigation system to increase productivity to the farm. 

The main role of parking in the city is to benefit selected daily activities of the city.  This means organising parking to serve retailers, commercial operations, leisure seekers, commuters and of course allowing for community access.  That is shopping, meetings, the gym or park, workers and disabled, cycling, motorbikes, trucks etc.  

Parking isn’t free and hasn’t been free for many years.  It should not go back to being free in any form unless the lack of occupancy determines that it should be free, but mostly it should be priced to allow just the right amount of cars parking in just the right amount of car parks.  If it’s too cheap, we get issues with circulation, cruising, double parking, property damage and rage incidents.  If it’s too expensive, then we get vast stretches of street where no one will park at all.  This is demonstrated in many cities and towns today where the parking has a single abstract price for parking in a casual car park right across the city.  This has creates a badly lop-sided nature to parking in the city and this type of structural weakness is the single most damaging act that parking can do.  This impedes economic activity at a time when the city and its rate payers should expect a parking activity to be facilitating economic activity and community access.  

I used an analogy at a previous conference that seemed to work when trying to describe how a city’s parking should be organised and that was; if you have a farm that is divided and fenced into 10 paddocks, we have all of our cows at one end of the farm, the grass is all gone and all that is left is just the mud created by the overcrowding and a lack of an ability to manage the consumption of that grass.  At the other end of the farm, we have overgrown grass that has now gone to seed and is not very palatable.  There is not a cow to be seen here (exaggerating to make the point).  In fact the gates and other equipment are starting to be mothballed through lack of use.   If you were a farmer that ran your farm that way, you would have the bank and the SPCA knocking on your door.  This management style has been acceptable in parking in the past, but not now.  Unfortunately, many cities and towns still farm their parking this way today. 

To find a solution on the farm, we would relocate the cows around the farm to eat the grass down evenly.  Each paddock would be monitored to check the amount of grass being eaten, just in case a particularly hungry group of cows ate the grass faster than before.  We would monitor the seasons so we could manage the farm more closely when the grass stopped growing in winter, or in the summer we could get some of our repairs and maintenance out of the way while there was plenty of grass.  In fact, if we were really good, we could increase the number of cows on the farm in summer or cut hay with the extra grass.  We would have to reduce the number of cows in winter as the feed became short.   

Farmers have to micromanage the cows around the farm and having a more efficiently run farm would improve profitability and allow us to increase productivity.  That means running more cows per paddock. Increasing productivity in parking terms is increasing our occupancy rates to ensure more cars are being parked in the same number of car parks.  Sound familiar? 

On the farm, the paddocks allow us to manage the cows more efficiently by tailoring the number of cows to fit the grass growth in each paddock.  In fact we are putting just the right amount of cows in to suit the characteristics of the paddock, its growth, its water supply, its share of sunlight and its quality of fencing.  Dividing the farm up into paddocks makes sense and this one simple thing allows us to manage the farm for better productivity and efficiency.  It just makes sense. 

Dividing the city up into zones that reflect the characteristics of that zone also just makes sense.  All we have to do in parking is to divide the city up into zones the right shape and size to affect the parking load creator in that zone.  The zone could fit around the retail zone, the commercial zone, the education zone, the park zone or whatever other zone you have.  Then we monitor the grass growth, oops, I mean occupancy in each zone and we use price to move the cars (cows) around. 

If the grass is tastier in the paddock next door, without a gate the cows would wander in and eat everything and trample the grass until it’s all destroyed.  Price acts like the gate, stopping cars from sitting in one area, cruising, double parking and causing congestion.  Just like a gate can be opened or closed to let a certain number of cows into the paddock to eat just the right amount of grass, the price should be able to go up and down also to control the number of cars in a zone to take up just the right amount of car park spaces. 

Gates and monitoring grass growth allow us to make better decisions on how we relocate cows around the farm for better farm efficiencies. Prices and monitoring occupancies allow us to make better decisions on how we relocate cars around the city for better parking efficiencies.  Even a lay-person understands that.

Kevin Warwood

Parking Operations Designer

Roading and rebuild issues are burning questions for inquisitive Cantabrians.

Since August, 112 reader queries have been sent to The Press for answers in Mainland Live's Q&A.

Out of the questions, 38 were about roads and roading issues, while 36 were about the rebuild.

The rest were about recycling, the environment, city maintenance, artworks in the city, transport, carparking, and buses.

Several people asked about right-turning signals at Christchurch intersections.

"I've been wondering for some time why there are so many light-controlled intersections that don't accommodate the traffic trying to turn right over the multiple lanes of oncoming traffic," said Karen, who withheld her surname.

"An example is the roadworks on Carmen Rd, where lanes are blocked in the centre of the road, forcing two lanes of traffic into one as they approach the lights. The upshot of this is if you are turning you cannot get a break in the traffic, forcing you to utilise the yellow and red lights. Why can't we have turning signals on these very busy intersections?"

However, there is no ready answer for this question, as the Christchurch City Council has a procedure for investigating whether right-turning signals are needed.

With rebuild questions, readers were concerned with the fates of structures and facilities they were familiar with.

Several asked about AMI Stadium - both old and new - and when rubble will be removed from the old Sydenham Heritage Church site.

Heritage buildings like the old Provincial Council Chambers and the Majestic Theatre on Manchester St also attracted questions about their fates.

"Every time I drive past the sad remains of the Provincial Council building on the corner of Durham and Gloucester streets, I wonder whether any of the beautiful hand-painted ceiling in the main building survived enough to be rescued," asked S Shaw.

The reader would be happy to know the council has said most of the stencilled ridge and furrow ceiling had been retrieved, along with the chamber's stone corbels, many undamaged, and fragments of the stained glass.

Examples of questions that have not yet found answers:

"Is there anywhere in the city that recycles the clean plastic wrapping from  The Press? I have been unsuccessful with my inquiries. It cannot go into the yellow bin and it is not good putting it into the landfill."

"Could you give us some explanation for the severe erosion of the sandhills north of the Waimairi Beach Surf Club? We have lived in this area now for 16 years, each winter we get storms that take bites out of the sandhills; they soon recover; but I have never before seen the dunes disappearing at the present rate. Has the local seabed shifted with the earthquakes off the coast or are there some other reasons?"

"Since the installation of the stretch [of new footpaths] outside the newly built shops on the corner of Westminster and Cranford Sts, I've seen two people tumble on to the road from the steep camber of the sidewalk. I think there's a serious accident waiting to happen to the less agile, aged or very young, or visually impaired. Can you please suss out the rational behind this departure from the flat, hazard-free footpaths we've had forever?"

Reconfigure for Greater Utilisation

Ever been frustrated by the current parking restrictions, because they don’t seem to match what is actually happening in that part of town?   The buildings have gone but the P5’s and Loading Zones are still there, not being used and just adding more on road decorations where clarity is needed.

Yellow lines, metered spaces, loading zones and time limits – such parking restrictions are an accepted fact of city life as a device in a local authority’s toolkit for managing efficient use of (usually) scarce stock of parking resources.

For most cities around New Zealand, parking provisions have developed organically, over time. But in the aftermath of the Canterbury earthquakes with its crumbling streets and demolished buildings, Christchurch City is facing the prospect of going back to square one and making major changes to the use of many car parks.  The Road Corridor Operations Manager, Paul Burden, decided that there was a need to go through the city and check if all of the currently marked parking and road restrictions were still required or could some be removed and returned to the public for normal use.  An example was, if a building was demolished, did we still need the P5 that was marked on the road outside that premises, which stopped the space being utilized by the normal user.

That process has started with building a picture of the supply of car parks, the signage that was left and the number of spaces and signs damaged by falling buildings and heavy equipment. The Parking Operations Team undertook the survey of on-street parking within the 'Four Avenues', the central city precinct bounded by Moorhouse, Fitzgerald, Bealey and Deans Avenues.

A team of dedicated staff members braved the streets and lumpy footpaths armed with GPS locators to geo-mark every parking sign, road marking, driveway and adjacent land use.  The data was fed into a database and attached to each car park or stretch of road utilising an internal document management tool.  The result is a very sharp (Google type) map (GIS file) in Geo-media, where a user can click on to a space and find out exactly what restriction is on the road, what the relevant Council ‘resolution’ states and provides an ability to run detailed reports. 

The next stage involved matching the current parking provision with the current need as they are now, as the use will likely be in the future very different to what was required in the past. Making changes is no simple task.  All the parking provisions are established legislatively so wherever a change is deemed necessary, the existing provision has to be revoked and a new resolution made to effect the change. And before any new resolutions are put before Council, consultation with affected building and business owners and operators must be completed.

The parking resolutions are being stored in an internal document folder and this is now the destination for all parking and road resolutions.  Collecting all of the resolutions was one of the key outcomes that the Traffic Engineers, Capital Programme, Transitional Project teams and Parking Operations and Enforcement asked for.  It has made all of their lives easier.  With the ‘Viewer’ version of the programme, the up to date information can now be distributed to all teams that have a responsibility to read, write or amend parking resolutions to Council or the Community Boards and at a much higher accuracy level.

The Parking Ops Team walked over 1000’s of kilometres of road, recorded the current use of over 10,000 car parks and returned many car parks back to normal unrestricted use.  More than that, they now have a very accurate tool that can tell you exactly what parking road markings are painted on the street and what is on the sign, without having to leave the building, speeding up the time it takes to make changes to on-street parking.

A further use is to allow a fast response to on-street parking data by giving a small amount of freedom to configuring car parking to allow for better utilisation of parking.  This brings the accepted timelines for configurations down to 12 months to 2 years and allowing the configurations to be changed to match neighbourhood characteristics much quicker rather than few it as an asset and never change it for 10 years.  A block of neighbourhood can cahnge its characteristics in that time to almost not resemble its original use and as such the road parking configurations must also change to keep the parking utilised.

The future steps will be to extend this tool to possible review issues in other high use urban areas and other high traffic areas, with the aim of improving the range of options for improving the utilisation of each and every car park.

 

 

 

 

Kevin Warwood

Parking Operations Designer

 

 

 

 

 

 

These comments are my own.

New Zealand Parking Association Conference Gets a Pass Mark

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.


 

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

Breaking Through the 'Google' Glass Ceiling - The Future of Parking

Oh, wouldn’t it be a great tool to be able to predict what might happen in the future and what a great fool you would be to think you can actually do it. To see coming proceedings as mere extrapolations of current thoughts, information and events, then put them all together into some kind of sense, would rank you along side ancient fortune-tellers, soothsayers and wealthy card players. Neither really exists as randomness tends to catch up with you, although some always say they have the gods on their side as they walk through the casino doors. It would be great to be able to do that but to understand that technology will bring many changes is not the realm of a clairvoyant, but merely a pragmatist. To determine what the revolution will be, sometimes feels like it is within the realm of a clairvoyant as most of the recent revolutions were out of left field.

Predicting what car parking operations might look like in the future is also an exercise in futility as there are so many functions and disciplines that touch parking. All of these functions and disciplines have their own champions to push the boundaries of the accepted frontier and the discoveries of technology and methodology in all of these disciplines will radiate an enlightened knowledge for parking to bathe in. Who would have thought that the cordless vacuum cleaner, light emitting diodes and infrared ear thermometers would have come from the space program? The future of parking can be anything, but having said that it does appear to be in the field of technology that the changes are coming at an ever increasing rate.

Being at the end of this book, it is appropriate to look into a crystal ball and see what might be on the horizon. What are the harbingers of things to come? There tends to be two different types of future products or themes to keep an eye on, work place trends and global trends that touch parking.

Workplace trends that will affect the parking industry are related to what our customers will be doing in the future. The rise of the female worker, longer working lives (but from home), the appearance of increased processing power in mobile phones, global climate change pressures, increasing frequencies of economic crises of various sorts, rise and resistance to social media (what’s the next big thing?), working from home, increased PT use, self driven cars and cloud computing, are all themes occurring now and affect the parking industry directly. Expectations change as the latest widget that gets sold via the internet television at home, is expected to start to pervade the parking industry, by demand of the customer immediately. I have confidence that we, as an industry, will keep up with customer demands to be engaged in different ways because if you don’t, someone else will.

Global trends will always overtake an industry, if it is not exposed to better, faster ways of doing things. Some new ideas appear like a tidal wave rather than an image of a cowboy slowly moseying his way into the foreground from the horizon. Global trends when accepted and embraced by an industry tend to permeate the suppliers and operators of an industry as they embrace the changes to enhance their own service or product offerings. If they don’t embrace it, the technology will replace the industry.

The explosion in communications equipment and its increased processing power has been phenomenal. Quad-core mobile phones are now the norm, a similar amount of computing power to what NASA used to land Apollo 13 on the moon! You can get an App for almost anything now. It almost appears that app-creators have run out of stuff to invent in cool businesses and have started to look around at a business like parking. Not that parking is not cool, it has just always been the poor cousin.

Self driven cars are here. The results of having these machines about require deep reflection by the parking industry. Get alongside these developments or get left behind will be the call. I still have some confidence that the mum and dad user will still require a space to park their oil powered old clunker. The gradual pervasion of the electric and hybrid car, into the national vehicle fleet, will speed up to a fast jog, before moving at a bolt-like pace in the years to come. Its how soon that will occur that should occupy minds more immediately. A change over must occur as climate change pressures mount. I know my mum will be driving her old car for many more years yet. There will still be millions of these cars around for some time. I would be more worried if I was a taxi driver than a car park operator as companies can afford to replace fleets of taxis with self driven cars before fleets of mums and dads, replace theirs.

I tend to think that the self driven car will create more traffic and congestion than we need. As the driver decides that the inner city parking fees are too expensive, they prefer to pay the price of extra fuel and send the cars home again or to a lot at the fringes of the city. This will have the affect of doubling the trips made each day and creating congestion on the way out of the city as well into the city.

Another looming battle will be the conflict between car haters and the pragmatists. The pragmatists will slowly move into their eco-cars but the car haters will still enjoy thrashing any person who owns an oil driven vehicle or an electric vehicle alike. Green cars and green parking garages will not satiate these people. This would not normally be an issue for most, but the fact that most of these people are in positions in the City or Councils and in national bodies will create a real issue between the normal traveller and the various Government bodies. I have seen the goodwill gestures of the public attending the public meetings after the earthquakes in Christchurch, proffer up suggestions on how they would like to see their city in 25 years time and the haters then turn that into such a change that the original submitters may very well say, “that’s not what I asked for!”. These issues are coming around the world.

Micromanagement of parking is here now. With the advent of the ‘cloud’ and the increased database and processing power that it provides, means that we can now search for information and calculate results on a giant computer stuck somewhere in a air-condition warehouse in the middle of a desert, and have the results piped to our mobile phones or tablets in milliseconds. It means we are able to run calculations on occupancies and prices almost instantaneously. Zone parking is the modern way of dividing up and managing the city’s parking resources. A zone is created around a major parking ‘load creator’ whatever it might be, university, airport or retail precinct, and the occupancies are responded to by a locally derived price. With modern parking technology, the zones can be any size or shape drafted onto a GIS platform for visual interpretation. City and private operations managers can now offer greater ROI by pushing occupancies to a much more intense level. 85% occupancy might already be a thing of the past, as we aim for higher levels. Micromanagement of parking is here but we have to wait for city officials to catch up.

Another example of technology making headway into parking and a battle I am looking forward to is the NFC versus Pay by Widget battle. I am already hearing people saying they are coming down on one side or another, or even skipping one technology altogether to wait for the other to triumph. I suspect there will be a shake out in the industry but there will be room for both. It won’t be solved next year but it will be bare-knuckled fight to watch. I suspect that with the computing power of the phone and its links to the cloud, they phone will win but don’t underestimate the power of the parking equipment makers. Parking equipment makers will always want NFC as it is an add-on to their equipment, but Pay by widget can be had by the customer simply owning a phone. We currently have 7 billion people on this planet and 6 billion phones. The big budgets of the equipment makers will offer up a tantalising message but in the end, the mobile phone will win as it connects to more people.

Outside of the Pay by Phone versus NFC debate is a new intruder. I’ve watched the arrival of products such as Google Glass over the last few months and wondered how this will change what we do in parking. I have not used it but have seen it on the many Youtube videos and they like. Can Glass enable parking users? Will third-party apps be there to help do so? Will the equipment companies latch on to this technology to drive the next revolution in parking?

There is a lot of interest in Glass use by many professions that require a ‘hands free’ approach to what they are doing, but the biggest group of interested parties will be drivers. Surgeons, CEO’s, and mechanics will have access to hands-free and real-time critical information. Some of the changes we will notice may be,

• Google at your eye tips – to answer any query while you are awake.

• Instant photos – never be without your camera or be too slow to get the shot you area after again.

• Mobile calls while driving – In many countries, its illegal to drive and talk on the phone, although that doesn’t seem to stop some people.

• Google maps in an instant – never get lost again.

• Google translator for travel – Read the food labels in French or Chinese with Glass on.

• Live traffic and news feeds – figure out a way around the jam you’re in by seeking alternatives routes and see why the traffic is stopped by the live news feed.

• Google calendar – make your appointment on the run. Forget the written diary from now on.

• Contact lens makers may become redundant – You will wear glasses, so no more contacts.

• iPhones may become a thing of the past – You just don’t need them anymore.

• They will look as good as Versace … eventually

• Parking - Find your car park by the use of one of the many parking apps or link directly to the parking equipment to open the barrier gate and even pay for your parking by accessing your bank account through your Glass.

The largest unanswered question is whether apps, called Glassware, will be there to boost Glass adoption. I believe that as soon as the price starts to come down, early adopters will drive a trickle of app creation and then the pay by phone techs and others will transfer to Glass apps.

Glass will revolutionise parking technology again, in a similar way that pay by phone and self driven cars are about to.

The entry into the market of technology giants has been a major move in the last couple of years. 3M, Xerox, Morgan Stanley and Google in the future are huge names in technology and finance and are related to other, more glamorous industries. They are infiltrating the parking business and bringing with them an intelligence that can cross-pollinate into this industry that is already not fallow of good ideas, but limited in the ability to apply them and limited by a lack of vision to buy the good ideas. These guys bring size, power and brands with them. Most of these companies have strayed into parking via transport and traffic but they are now here. A side affect of this entry into the market by global giants is the assortment of ivy leaguers they bring with them.

With all of these options, there are three major challenges for all parties in parking. Firstly, the one challenge for the parking practitioner is to push the boundaries of and embrace new technology to create a solution for the customer that extends knowledge and more intensely improves parking utilization. The result being increased ROI.

A huge challenge for the parking practitioner is to get the parking methodology right, to suit the designed parking plan. Then the parking technology decisions, made after the methodologies are chosen, area an easy choice made from the point of finding equipment and technology that will suit your plan’s goals. The result is increased ROI, although this wont be from parking but from the customers activity that parking supports.

A final challenge is one for parking customers, and that is to rely on the practitioners to get the choices right, to keep up to date with changes. Not easy since most people think parking is simple, easy and still adequate with single-head meters.

Parking is now sexy. Then again, I always thought it was.