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.

How do you deal with too much parking?

It's a conundrum facing many Cities.  How do you get 85% occupancy when
there are less than 60% of all spaces actually being used?

This is a question I ask here in Christchurch, New Zealand.  The context
is that after the earthquakes, there are now a large number of vacant
sites, awaiting developments, that are being used as car parks.  There
are 1,500 cars parking in 2,700 private off-street sites (all open-air
lots) in the CBD as no buildings are open yet.  So how do you control
parking to 85% when there aren't enough vehicles to get past 56%?

 

 The answer is to break the city into zones and manage the occupancies in
the zone separately, then set a wider 'working' occupancy goal of about
60% to 85%.  Don't use too narrow a 'band' around the 85% target, as
it's almost impossible to achieve at this stage where there is a lot of
vacancy.  Zone management then gives you the ability to relocate
vehicles around the city by pricing to affect the local activity level
in that local zone, for the purpose of maximising the utilisation of the
parking resource.  You may be able to offer higher prices where there is
a PT choice (by removing supply), higher prices where there is over-use
such as on the western edge of the Christchurch CBD today.  You can also
start to remove spaces for the purposes of better landscaping or other
mode changes.

 

Gap Filler Project - Christchurch

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 We also know that we need to create and administer an operational system
that will be flexible enough, over time, to deal with the current
situation where there is too much supply; then change to a system where
the developments have occurred and we have a under-supply.

The final step if you like, is where the city is fully back to normal
and congestion is occurring and mode shift needs a bit of a boost, as
most cities require a mode shift in their transport plans these days.
To get the required mode shift, we may need to put in the plans that a
desire that public car parks are all managed to a guide of 85% but also
private car park resources (don't know how to enforce it yet) are also
managed to 85%.  That will see a large reduction in extra car parks, the
combining of car parks by neighbours and the use of car parks for other
uses.

That's the theory anyway.

 

Kevin Warwood

Poor Man’s Performance Parking

We have heard that the ‘new black’ in on-street parking is Performance Parking as espoused by Donald Shoup and we have read about the up sized version of performance parking that is Adaptive Parking as espoused by Paul Barter.  To some local bodies or cities, this is akin to me staring at a Lamborghini through a shop window.  It requires significant investment in infrastructure, marketing and organisational time and effort.  Although held up as the utopia of on-street parking, there are probably a few things we can do to step change our way to Performance and Adaptive Parking or even run that 1960 Ford a little longer before aiming at the Lamborghini.

The general view of parking in the city is one of organic growth around over-crowded or popular activities, such as malls, entertainment, CBD, airports and the like.  These areas start to get restricted time parking, which then moves on to metered parking….. yes I’m generalising.   This creates issues where the city must then decide that it must identify the area, usually reactively by complaint, that requires attention, scope the area and then meter the area as required.  This will curb demand or at least control it.

Metering is the obvious first step in getting to a new paradigm where the prices are estimated and programmed into the machines, and you watch the changes in behaviours to work out if the behaviours are those that would help achieve the City’s growth goals.  This may take a while as you work your pricing systems and responses into the sweet spot of 1 in 8 vacancies on the street.  Unfortunately this generally will not happen as the City executive fear a backlash from the paying public, so parking rates are usually too low, causing little change to congestion and an outcry of profiteering because the public see no demonstrative result from the exercise. It may be best to go straight to a full performance price on street.  The public may be upset (as they were before) but they will SEE a demonstrative change.

 Performance Parking requires clever machinery that has the ability to have its parking rates changed quickly and responsively to the changing, sometimes hourly, demand in the street.  This demand is fed from the in-space units that read the proximity of a vehicle to determine if a vehicle is in the bay or not.  The more occupancy, the higher the fees should change to in response to the demand, to get the 1 in 8 ratio.  Simple really.  Expensive definitely.  So how do you get to a poor man’s version of Performance Parking without the bells and whistles?

Step 1 - I suggest you start a trial where you test for space usage in a typical street.  Meter-Eye or CPT as they are now known, have used a large heavy rubber mat with a detector or Meter-Eye attached to it.  You can throw these mats into typical or strategic spaces and start to collect the data.  It will tell you how many cars parked in the bay and how long they stayed for.  Extrapolate that collective information over the area and you have the first step in the equation, DEMAND.  You also have the second step in the equation, AVERAGE LENGTH OF STAY or DURATION. 

 Step 2 - Monitor the traffic over a number of periods, whether they be day time, as this is the time of worst congestion or in the evening for an area adjacent to evening or event demand.  This will give you the PEAK USAGE and the peak usage will tell you when your parking rates should be at the maximum to achieve your service levels of 1 in 8 vacant spaces.  Be careful here not to miss any double tops or other anomalies in the peak usage.  In hospitals for instance, the peaks are generally twice in a day.  You may have to survey over a period of months to get a complete picture.

Step 3a - If you already have meters on the street, and they allow you to change the rates without too much trouble, then change your rates manually in the most congested blocks, initially for a block of the days that are most congested, i.e. Wednesday to Friday, then change them back from Saturday to Tuesday.  This will introduce Performance Parking on a 'weekly' basis rather than a 'daily' basis.  You have to give up the daily changes until you can afford an investment in the technology that will allow you to do that without incurring wage costs that will wipe out any revenue savings.

Step 3b - If you do not have any meters, then you may want to find the technology that will allow you to amend the rates at your will.  A lot of machines will not allow you to change your charging rates or the supplier will do the change for you but their service is so slow that, in some cases, it takes 2 to 3 weeks to get a simple rate change completed.  These vendors are to be AVOIDED as they prevent Performance Parking.  You may have to go to an RFP to seek competent vendors.  Ensure you reference Performance Parking in your RFP.  This is not the poor mans version but the way to the full blown Performance Parking.

Step 4 -  Set the initial rates.  Most cities appear to have rates that are well under the ideal rates.  They have set rates in the past that still allow circulating in the streets, a clear sign your rates are too cheap.  The level of change in the rates to go up and down by will be difficult to work out.  SF Park is using 50c at a time, but I tend to think that this is a little light as if you move a rate from $3.00 per hour to $3.50 per hour will not deter circulating or behaviour change swiftly enough.

Step 5 - Monitor and amend until you get the ideal occupancy levels.

To summarise the Poor Man's Performance Parking,  find a company that will allow you to use their technology to get a picture of the 'load' on the street over a week (not daily unless you want to go the full blown version), find the demand, Peak, Average Length of Stay, change the charging for parking by the DAY and not the HOUR allowing you to use even cheaper/older/existing equipment, set rates to achieve the required occupancy levels, monitor and adjust.

Kevin Warwood