Ranking New Zealand Council's Parking

After attending a recent New Zealand Parking Conference this (southern) spring, I was heartened to see that some Councils are working diligently toward a new future well with a much deeper knowledge of how parking contributes to the vitality of a city or town.  They are taking on board the fast intrusion of new the technologies with the enthusiasm of a kid with that latest fishing rod - they know its god but are not quite sure how to get the best out of it.  The strides new technology is making to parking around the world are immense and permanent. It is not the same business it was 10 or even 5 years ago.

Some Councils are progressing faster than others, and their cities and towns are benefiting from the support to their economic vitality a modern parking system can provide.  But we don’t know who these Councils are as there has been no way to measure how all Councils are doing against each other and against the major players in the market.  We can’t tell how or if a city's and town's parking resources are benchmarked against the rest and how they are actually being managed.   But we can now….sort of.

Benchmarking is not a dirty word, for obvious improvement and quality reasons.  Also since the national environment is now ranking everything such as schools and District Health Board services, it seems like a natural progression that we should rank our Council parking systems.  As Councils collectively around the country manage a staggeringly large number of car parks for their communities and take in a large amount of parking revenue, there is a very real opportunity to manage this resource in a manner that provides positive returns to the businesses, the community and the ratepayers by simply doing things better and learning off those who do it better.  So why not rank them!

 Those in the best space to understand what Councils are doing in the field of technology and modern parking methodologies are the service providers.  They will visit each Council and talk to them at events like conferences, where they can form an opinion on how disposed each Council seems to improving what they are providing.  So we surveyed them.

 The results of the survey, conducting shortly after the New Zealand Parking Association conference has been positive in that most respondents wanted the outcomes to be aimed at improvement.  I need to say that very few of the comments were negative, which is a great place for the industry to start.

 Also please note that these companies did NOT want to do this openly for obvious reasons.

 The questions had not been split between the parking operations and the parking enforcement wings of Councils as some of the smaller Councils don’t split the two specialties anyway.

The questions that were asked were to provide an opinion on how each Council appeared in,

·         OPENNESS TO TRY new parking systems
·         UNDERSTAND new parking systems, methodologies and technologies
·         STAY INFORMED about new parking systems, methodologies and technologies
·         Offer VALUE for parking spend by Councils
·         Appear to be well CONTROLLED & ORGANISED

 All of these questions were asked from the perspective of someone who views most Councils and in some cases can review New Zealand’s Councils against world standards.

Results

The results show some interesting features, namely that when the results are marked out of a possible 4, the industry average is 2.4 which means that most of the City Council portion of the parking industry is above or close to average.  We’re not sure if this is a good result or not but as time goes on, we can view the trends to see if our Councils are improving their service offer.  I suspect that if I was facing ratepayers and businesses that I would want my parking operation to be supporting economic vitality and community access with much more than an average result!

A handful of Councils have achieved above a 75% result in the opinion of the respondents.  It’s probably not a coincidence that these organisations have a very proactive and positive approach to what parking may deliver to their city, Auckland Transport recently completing its Draft Unitary Plan, Christchurch City recently completed its new Central City Parking Plan and Rotorua experimenting with solutions around its retail parking.

Honourable mentions go to Invercargill City Council who respondents say asked some good questions of the survey contributors at conference and New Plymouth City Council who are also spending time on trying to get their solutions right for the community.

Some of the responses have been interesting, when asked for some simple thoughts.  A collection of those are below,

1.       What best describes the biggest issue you have with Councils parking teams?

·         Operations oriented (as in council centric) rather than customer oriented.

·         The linking of vehicle sensing technologies with customer parking payment solutions. The 2 do not need to be linked.

·        Budget. The old adage "you get what you pay for" very much applies here.       Also, an inability or unwillingness to hold suppliers accountable for poor         product/service supplied.

·         Lack of understanding when it comes to technology.

·   Difficult to access a decision maker, and council officers pretend they are  decision makers.

·        No issues.

·    They do not understand how technology can manage utilisation. Only pay lip  service to this.

·         Wasteful procurement methods.

·         Tender process too long.

·         Lack of general computer knowledge.

2.        What is the biggest change you would like Councils to make to improve their parking value offer to their city or town?

·         Raise the price of parking and use time variable price parking so that there is always some proportion (say15%) available parking.
·         A more aggressive approach to encouraging the uptake of Smartphone solutions for payment of parking by customers.
·         Directed enforcement will provide the opportunity to achieve optimal compliance/turnover. Increase the infringement fees too - they simply are not a deterrence.
·         Use the data from technology to improve the customer experience, determined planning.
·         Think like business people instead of just bums on seats.
·         Make on-street parking more affordable with shorter time limits then utilise major car parks for longer term use.  On-street short stay, off-street long stay.
·         Focus on utilisation not revenue. Abolish the tender system and let cities chose providers as the private sector would.
·         Improve their procurement practices to stop wasting money.
·         More openness to new technologies.
·         Internal training improved.

Conclusion

Parking is always an emotional topic when it actually doesn’t need to be.  It is generally simple economics, supply v demand.  As an industry it has had a ‘state-control like’ price structure for decades, which is why many people do not respect the industry – they don’t see the value in it like it was a market priced litre of fuel.  It is also touched on the periphery by many and varied people, occupations and activities that don’t understand how scientific it has actually now become.

It is clear that the Council parking industry in New Zealand needs to improve, as measured by the respondents to this survey, but the average is not bad.  We suspect that the ratepayers and communities of New Zealand would also see improvement as a necessary step for vote ratepayer funds.   We hope the Councils take this information as a positive opportunity.

Parking is not going to get any less important over the next 30 years and with some Councils looking to maintain their current vehicle loads and to mode change the growth from now and into the future from petrol to electric.  It is clear we need to better understand how to control and manage that contribution that Council parking makes to each city.

Kevin Warwood

How to Park like the New Zealand All Blacks

Watching the mighty All Blacks beat the USA rugby team at Chicago in November made me think about how this team has become one of the most successful sports teams the world has ever seen.  The ‘All Blacks’ (reference to the colour of their uniform) are the national rugby team of New Zealand, and even taking into account the fact that there are only 4.5 million people in New Zealand, their achievements on the world stage and against much larger countries, have been mind-bogglingly successful.

To give you some idea of their stature, over the 144 years rugby has been played in New Zealand and the 130 years the All Blacks have been playing other countries, they have only ever been beaten by 5 countries, won 400 of their 524 games played at a win rate of 76%.  As of September 2014 this year, they are on a streak that includes 20 games in a row unbeaten and 36 games unbeaten at home, all against tier one international teams and in some hostile environments from Johannesburg to Buenos Aeries and now London to Chicago.  They became the first rugby nation in the professional era to achieve a 100% winning record in a calendar year.

 It’s difficult to compare their success because of subjectivity but records show some of the best local and international teams of all time are,

Win % Wins    Losses Year                Team   Comment

.764     400      124      1884-2014       NZ National All Blacks Rugby

.673     70        34        1914-2014       Brazil National Soccer Football

.878     72        10        1995–96          Chicago Bulls  best 82-game season

.825     60        8          1976–77          Montreal Canadiens

.798     67        17        1880                Chicago White Stockings

How do you create a winning team like the All Blacks?  How does an organisation go out to fashion a record almost unmatched around the world for any local or international sporting team, over such a long period?  I have tried to put down on paper a few of the immediately obvious traits that the All Black organisation clearly used to their benefit and these traits can be transposed over to a commercial parking organisation.

Talent

The definition of talent is a natural aptitude or skill.  I don’t believe this.  I believe talent comes from hard work and years of preparation.  You may have heard of the 10,000 hours (Malcolm Gladwell) it comes to becoming an expert.  Take Tiger Woods, he achieved expert status probably by the time he was 5-7 years old, and today that would be Lydia Ko. 

Access to or attracting the best talent is a major challenge for any organisation, but for one that has its eyes on being world class, it needs the best talent on board, with the best talent coming through in a wave right behind, pushing standards higher and higher.

To test this I went through a number of parking job vacancies online to check out what the vital and typical skill or talent was that if in abundance in your organisation, would transform you into a world class parking outfit.  There are no single set of skills that makes a parking person like accounting makes an accountant or law makes a lawyer.  Organisations have advertised for public administration, business administration, engineering, Bachelor Science, Bachelor Arts, or ANY 4 year degree.  To cloud the water even more, for my team here, I look for economics skills – the balance of supply & demand must be understood as a priority.  You can sub-contract the other skills.

Maybe identifying talent young, with basic skill sets and investing in them until they become world class is a way to improve your business. I don’t know of any parking company that does that.

Clarity of Purpose

The structure must be set to be focussed on ONE goal, success.

 The All Blacks are blessed with a structure in New Zealand where every town has a rugby club.  When New Zealand was being developed in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the rugby club was the place where all of the farmers and town folk would meet up.  It was like the town hall and so the game spread around the country.  Today you could not replicate that infrastructure simply.  Most sports organisations short circuit that process by having commercial relationships with other clubs around the world.  Parking companies should look at something similar to extend their influence and to access resources limited in their own environment.

The New Zealand Rugby Union controls ALL rugby in the country.  Every town has a team, every suburb or region has a representative team, every region flows into a provincial team and 26 provinces in New Zealand form the five Super Rugby franchises that compete with teams other countries that go from South Africa, Asia, Australia, New Zealand to Argentina … the long way around!  Each of these franchises from New Zealand form the All Blacks.  With that pyramid structure, it’s easy to see how THE single goal of a small country is a winning national rugby team.

Many companies including parking companies do not know what their single goal is and in not knowing that goal, they can’t organise themselves to achieve it in a world class fashion.  The All Blacks organise themselves to win international rugby matches better than anyone else in the world, what does your parking company do?

Complete Trust

 The management structure of the New Zealand Rugby Union gives the right to organise and run the rugby programme of the All Blacks to the All Blacks management.  They understand that the coach and players are the experts and will get it right.  Rugby Union focus is on supporting the team through good times and bad.  They trust completely that the team is doing the right things to achieve its goals.

How may cities, councils and perhaps companies trust their teams to get the job done?  An example of this is when the Councillors, Mayor or even the CEO give direction of operational matters like pricing.  Operational matters belong to operations and in this case the All Black team.  You wouldn’t hear of the Union instructing the All Blacks on tactics.

A Healthy Impatience

With a positive and achieving culture, supported by a trusting management structure, you can develop a team that pulls together during bad times and still manages to win, even in the last minute of the game.  However, to consistently beat the world, you must get there first.  This means that developing new technologies or new methodologies to operate your car park should be trialled and tested, even if no one else in the world has ever done it before.  Not rushed, just impatient.

Developing a healthy impatience or a positive edginess should be encouraged.  The All Blacks score more points than any opposition, even when they go a player down with a yellow card.  Even when they are 14 on 15 players, their record shows they rise and score more points.  This is a staggering achievement based on a desire to be the best in the world. 

The All Blacks have shown the world that to be world class you have to get a bunch of things right, all at the same time.  They don’t wait for others to achieve, they don’t wait for others to learn how the All Blacks do it and catch up, they keep challenging, testing, trialling, watching, adapting, recruiting, trusting, desiring and building.  Aren’t these traits we want in our business and the industry?

Kevin Warwood

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

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.

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

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 6^th September 2014.

Read More Here ....

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 .....

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

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.