Thursday, September 4, 2014
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).
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
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