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