Friday, December 19, 2014

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

Thursday, September 4, 2014

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.





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.

Monday, September 1, 2014

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

Tuesday, August 26, 2014

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.


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.







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 6th September 2014.




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

Wednesday, April 2, 2014

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

Tuesday, March 25, 2014

And here comes the Parking Revolution!



Television New Zealand missed the point here with this news item.  Its not that the car park has sensors or there are no barriers or its a Pay by Phone car park site alone, no this is the first 'dynamically priced' car park in NZ.

Now most people wont understand what that means but they need to because this means you are now only ever going to pay for parking, exactly what it is worth!  No more over-priced or under-priced parking, just parking charged at the correct value.  Wow.

Dynamic pricing in parking means that the price will move with the demand, that is, if the car park is empty, the price will drop and if the car park is full, the price will rise.

I said this was a revolution.  How is this a revolution I hear you ask?  Well, in two ways it is a huge change in the parking industry and the consumers need to note this.

One, all organisations that don't use this method of charging will be found out.  They will be identified as lazy or just not caring enough about the user to amend the prices to actually what the parking, on that day, in that location, is worth.  Those that act like a monopoly will be forced eventually to change or hey will suffer ridicule from the public.

Two, the public will not have parking to use as its subject of folly any more.  The emotion that most people attach to parking will be removed.  The emotion is attached to parking because some organisations that manage parking have mis-managed the pricing of it.  Ask yourself, if an organisation just adds CPI (inflation index) to a price, is there really competition here, are we as consumers really getting the best price and is the inflation adjustment related to anything other than revenue gathering?

In a fully functioning market where consumers get the best price related to what they want to buy, that is low prices if they want a slap up job or the best price for the best widget, parking in some quarters has been a fixed price, one price for all and unrelated to the value you get for the time in that car park   No wonder everyone has been emotional about parking.  Amend the price to relate it to demand, like almost every thing we buy in the world today, from petrol to broccoli, and people will understand why they are paying the price they do, and that will remove the emotion.  We may not like the price but we will understand it and who doesn't like to get  a bargain, especially in parking.

And here comes the revolution.


Read the Story and Watch the Video Here.

Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Is it time to review parking fines????

Parking commuters swoop - Is it time to review the parking fines????

Amy Calway            Cynthia Beeby

Residents of Freemans Bay and Ponsonby in Auckland are struggling with commuters who circle waiting for residents to drop their children off at school and nab their car parks, then put on their running shoes and jog to work.  They may get a $12 parking fine, but that is a good trade off when parking in Auckland can cost more than $12.  Is it time to review the level of parking fines so they become a deterrent?


Read more here .......

Monday, March 10, 2014

Frog Opens High Tech Car Park ...


Frogparking Business Development Manager Michael Tuttiett using a iPhone Frogparking app via a frogparking sensor attached to windscreen.

Palmerston North has become home to what may be the world’s most high-tech carpark, where the amount drivers pay depends on how many spaces are available.

The 33-space carpark in the city’s Church Street has been kitted out with solar-powered sensors by local parking technology firm Frogparking that can tell which parks are occupied. Drivers pay for parking through their smartphone.

Frogparking has been providing ticketless parking systems to Palmerston North for a few years, but director Don Sandbrook said the new system was its most advanced yet, with cheaper parking if there were lots of spaces available and higher prices if they were nearly all taken. The tariff ranges from 50 cents to $2 an hour.

Regular patrons can use a GPS-enabled windscreen tag that will automatically bill their credit card, but there is no cash option.

Sandbrook said there was plenty of on-street parking nearby for “little old ladies” who found the technology complicated. “If you don’t have a smartphone, we don’t want you to park in the carpark.”

He believed everyone would be paying for all parking by smartphone within 10 years. “There will be no other way.”

Drivers pay only for the time they are parked and local retailers can send codes to customers’ smartphones that entitle them to have their parking fees refunded if they take up shopping offers.

A local cafe, Cafe Moxies, has been the first to do that, but three other retailers are offering parkers in-store discounts.

Sandbrook said Palmerston North could become the “world’s innovation hub” for the parking industry and help cities around the world revive their retail centres.

- © Fairfax NZ News




Read Article Here ...........

Friday, March 7, 2014

Parking Nation Tradeshow & Exhibition- CALL FOR ABSTRACTS – Last Minute Reminder!




CALL FOR ABSTRACTS – Last Minute Reminder!


Parking friends,

The Parking Nation Exhibition’s CALL FOR ABSTRACTS is about to close.

On behalf of Parking Nation Exhibition 2014 (PNX14) team, we would like to invite you to submit abstracts for oral presentation at PNX14 to be held at the Chateau-on-the-Park Hotel, Riccarton, Christchurch on 27-29 May 2014.

Parking Nation will be attended by all of those in parking in councils & municipalities, commercial operators, airports, hospitals, universities and campuses, property, agents, service contractors, parking equipment, technology, hotels, transport & traffic engineers and planners, parking consultants, enforcement, mobile phone technology suppliers, design & construction, lighting suppliers, printing, tender contractors and retail & mall operators.


TOPICS

The following topics are some of the themes that will be addressed at PNX14. However other relevant topic subjects may be put forward by presenters:

  • License Plate Technology
  • Lighting & LED Technology
  • Electric Vehicle in a modern parking world
  • Sensor Technology & guidance systems
  • Smart Cities – data integration
  • Tech camp
  • Successful parking RFPs & Tenders
  • And more


 The closing date for abstract submissions is Friday, 7th March 2014.

PREPARING YOUR ABSTRACT

  • Abstracts must not exceed 300 words, excluding title, authors and institutions. The abstract should include the essential technical qualities of the paper. No acknowledgements or references are required with the abstract. 
  • Abstracts may include a simple table or figure.
  • Must include a succinct overview of the intent and purpose of the oral or poster presentation.
  • No specific abstract format is required.  The key requirement is to give the organising team a clear understanding of what would be presented.
  • Prior experience in speaking should be noted.


To submit your abstract, please go to www.parkingnation.co.nz and go to the link to attach the Abstract.

Please circulate this information as widely as possible and encourage your colleagues to submit abstracts for PNX14.

If you have any queries on the above, please do not hesitate to contact us.


You just have to get your Parking Enforcement right or we all look like Plonkers!



A 47-YEAR-OLD woman is warning other motorists using Burton’s Queen’s Hospital’s controversial parking system to keep their receipts with them – after managing to get her fine quashed.  

05/03/14 hospital parking storyQueens Hospital parking complaint / Parking Eye....Kay Tomlinson

Kay Tomlinson, of Sunnyside, Newhall refused to pay the £70 fine she received for parking in the hospital last month because she said she had paid the correct amount to park.

She was only fined after Parking Eye claimed she input her registration details incorrectly – which she denies. Despite paying the correct amount she was still fined.



Article Here

Thursday, March 6, 2014

Well readers, I have finally gotten rid of my Internet Explorer 8 and now have Google Chrome.  This means I can now add to the Blog without all of the issues I have had over the last few months and start to write regularly again.  Watch this space.


Sunday, February 2, 2014

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