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

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.

Parking Operations Design - A Lesson

I had an interesting email conversation with a General Manager (names removed of course) of a major parking equipment provider the other day. It started out as a discussion on the article about supply and demand economics, or actually the theory of Constraints, and how to get to 100% occupancy. The discussion ended up with a summary of how I see the purpose of parking and how the purpose of parking serves the city. This is a sort of step by step guide to designing a city’s parking operation. These tips will also give you the ability to micro-manage parking.

 

Parking operations systems can be simple. Here are some of the basics;

 

• The purpose of parking is to support economic activity. An economist will argue that even a visit to a park, University or Hospital has an economic impact. Christchurch City Council's Long Term Plan has some wording around 'Community Outcomes' for parking, but in the end, they all add up to mean, at its highest level, supporting economic activity.
• Measure what is happening on the street. On-street parking is the bellwether of all activity in the city. Its the nervous system of the body of the city. If construction or retail picks up, it will be reflected on the street. If the area becomes dead, the street will tell you. You can measure the fact that a new off-street car park opened by the data you get from the on-street machines, and then you amend your prices. Measuring what is happening on the street will tell you how to approach your pricing. You also don’t need to purchase sensors to start with. You can measure occupancy and utilization (Utilization is occupancy over a period of a day). 
• Set up zones or precincts of the right size and shape to affect the parking load or activity in the local area, be it a mall, a university or a commercial district. Christchurch has 16 (draft) zones. Having zones that are too big creates abstract pricing. Abstract prices will support activity somewhere in the city at some stage, but will be too high in some and too low in others. Prices must be just right ... all the time. Having smaller zones allows you to micro-manage your pricing and modern technology can now help you to micro-manage parking. Zones also allow you to set zoned permanent on-street parking or residential parking in certain zones only.  
• Link pricing to occupancy. Managing your demand to 85% occupancy, not higher or lower. This will make sure that the retailers are happy as you can't get more customers into a retailers car park than the capacity of a car park. Extra cars are just people circulating and not shopping. Retailers rarely understand this. Retail's issue is one of capacity and management of that capacity, not price. If shoppers don't come, drop the price. If they do and its overcrowded, raise the price. You still cant get more customers in than the number of car parks, so price is irrelevant other than to maintain occupancy. 
• Enforce to support parking operations. The purpose of enforcement is to support the parking operation's designed plan. If the plan is not right, it only hinders economic activity because too many tickets are issued. One of my mantras is 'your level of parking enforcement is equal to the level of mis-understanding of your parking operation'. Enforcement also gives you some good signals that the parking operation is not right, by the number of tickets being issued or a change in the number of tickets being issued. 
• Get the parking decisions closer to the operation. Politicians generally only know about price when they deal with parking. They don't understand the other issues that make up the price. I'm not saying they don't want to know. They are busy people. So education is best so the best decisions are based on occupancy, not price.

  If you manage to get all of this past the politicians, you will have a fully functioning, parking operation that is responsive to the many detected changes in the city's on-street activities..... and it will support economic activity. Simple. The perfect parking operation is one designed to read and respond to on-street, off-street, public, private and institutional parking signals.

  

Technology must fit into this plan. The decision on the type of technology to buy is the last decision made. We sometimes get our priorities back to front by purchasing equipment without understanding the design of the parking operation nor the purpose of the parking, first.

  The key understanding that must be made here is that this system will work in Hospitals, Airports, commercial structures, on-street and shopping malls. When run well, it will enhance the customer experience and not hinder it. It will ensure greater use of the car parks and manage the peaks.

 

The bigger key message is that we often don't design our parking operations well in the first place nor do we re-design it when it needs help.

 
 

Kevin Warwood

Parking Operations Designer

 

 

 

These views are my own.

Starting All Over Again - Parking After an Earthquake

Hi all,

I promised I would include a video of my presentation to the Australian Parking Convention here so here it is.  Only its me doing it from home and not from the convention.

 

I have attached a couple of the videos I used as well to give you some perspective and context to what we are trying to achieve in Christchurch.

This video of the devastation of Christchurch is eye opening.  http://youtu.be/zFk7KnRALXk

The vision of the new Christchurch gives us some faith that the future is positive, even CERA is starting to understand how important parking is to a city in rebuild mode.

Its simple, parking supports 70% of all activity in a city.  To have parking support the rebuild of a city, parking must support 'economic growth or economic activity', to achieve that, parking must aim at full 'utilization' of parking spaces, of which the right fit of a 'modern parking methodology' and a 'modern parking technology' is vital.

Understanding what you have happening in the city is imporatnt.  You must be able to monitor the activity before you can respond with prices and restrictions in parking.  In Christchurch we develpoed a heat map of the activity.

I hope you all enjoy the video, but be aware its 30 minutes long so make a coffee to view it.

Happy holidays.

Kevin Warwood

On-Street Parking: A Stethoscope to Monitor a City’s Economic Activity and Vitality.

On-Street Parking: The Bellwether of a City’s Economic Activity and Vitality.

I have suspected for some time that there will be a ‘one thing’ that is the parameter that will show the health and economic vitality of a city and it will have something to do with parking.  I was right.

On-street parking, when monitored well (as a lot of cities still don’t do the monitoring bit well enough yet but is improving), can be the bellwether of a city’s economic activity and vitality.  A bold statement when there are so many other possible bellwethers out there and so many more that are more fashionable to monitor, such as inflation, building consents, GDP and others.  But none will give you the activity signal immediacy like on-street parking.

There are some rules that have to be in place first of course, you have to be able to monitor the parking meters occupancies or transactions in real time and it doesn’t even matter if you are still using abstract pricing.

On-street parking gives us the one signal to indicate how large, small or size of change that is occurring in the city and you can see it everyday in your parking stats.  I set up a group of reports from my ITSL metro parking machines to deliver data each morning that I can then compare to a standard norm for parking activity. I have had to spend a number of hours and my teams hours getting the right data as the reports from the machines are limited in scope, but we finally are able to monitor the change in activity everyday.

Think about it.  On-street parking is the recipient of every change that happens within a city.  If a construction site opens up, the car parks and the street are full of contractors and other related activities, so my reports show me that a change is happening and I go and look to see that a building is going up.  If a building is being demolished (likely in Christchurch right now), then a private car park opens up and drains the street with cheaper pricing.  My reports pick up a lack of activity in the street and I go and look to find the new off-street car park open and thriving with cars that were parking on-street.

On-street parking is like the collection of arteries and veins of the body.  They flow around the city picking up any changes to activity or vitality of the city.  Get your stethoscope out, make sure it can monitor what you want it to monitor and listen to the changes.

Kevin Warwood