The Battle of San Francisco.

The Big Supply & Demand parking experiment. 

The SF Park-ing project in San Francisco is turning the on-street parking paradigm on its head with the introduction of simple price adjustments by 'supply and demand'.

'So what?' I hear you say.  This has been the realm of the off-street parking paradigm for decades.  Why is introducing it into the on-street paradigm so news worthy?  The reason it is so important is that the on-street parking area has been the playground of the politician for years.  The parking professional has held sway in off-street car park buildings but the politician has known better in the on-street area. 

This experiment in San Francisco is the parking expert finally getting enough trust from the politicians that they wont lose enough votes to worry them and they will balance any loss with the better goodwill created by a city street that will be able to operate well under normal demand and supply conditions.

If this experiment doesn't work, this methodology will die a very public death and it will never be spoken of again for many years until people forget about SF Park and someone tries again.  This will be a disaster as the politicians will quickly try to wrest control back from the parking professionals again ..... and business as usual.

In SF Park we are starting to see the emergence of high technology, spread to even the furthest reaches of the parking realm, the individual car park bay.  This technology is now starting to support the parking professional in their assertions, as they are now getting the objective data to prove what many have thought by experience and observation, but could never get a budget big enough to prove.

I suspect that this project will give us some very encouraging results, enough for other cities to start to utilise the depth and breadth of technology out there now, to benefit a better understanding of the parking environment.  Before long there will be plenty of evidence out there to build a business case for even the trickiest of cityscapes.

This experiment will be seen not just as the triumph of parking professionals over politicians, but the start of the triumph of objectivity over subjectivity.  That is more important.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/16/us/program-aims-to-make-the-streets-of-san-francisco-easier-to-park-on.html

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

Car Park / Lot / Parkade Analysis

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Business Analysis Services offered to evaluate, cost and recommend new or existing car parks, from loss makers to additions to your portfolio.

I have been involved in car parking for many years from managing;

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Send me an email to kevin.warwood@gmail.com and we can discuss your needs. 

Kevin Warwood

Company who brought us Meter - Eye now targets the disabled bay abusers.

The New Zealand tech company that brought us the Meter-Eye, and has flatteringly been copied around the world, has now brought us a sensor that will allow for disabled bay abusers to be caught and infringed automatically.  Ingeniously simple and set up to have maximum uptake and marketing affect, the system should revolutionise the compliance side of disabled bay parking.

The Good - disabled bay abusers will get infringed immediately if they don’t have the right transponder in their vehicle.  The in-bay sensor will interrogate the vehicle as it sets itself over the top of the sensor, and if an in-car transponder doesn’t reply, then a message will be sent to the local enforcement team to attend and issue an infringement notice.

Also, uptake will be automatic, as the people who utilise the bays will want to have a transponder in their vehicles.  Uptake will be like a wildfire out of control.

The Bad - The sound of the people bellowing at local municipal authorities, large chains and the smallest of retail outlets will be deafening and create another item in the cold war style of technology one-upmanship.  Even authorities that can’t afford the new technology will be chastised by its citizens to keep up.

The abusers who do have the in car transponders, that is people who are NOT using the cars for the legitimate purpose of transporting a disabled user, will also get best seats in the house.  Nothing can be done about this abuse.

All in all, this is a great first step and the technology will be improved upon and the breadth of the technology will allow for the 'idea' to sprout up in other areas unrelated to disabled parking.

Kevin Warwood

Sensor tech Company Targets Parking Rogues

New Zealand Company Car Parking Technologies has created a product that uses sensors and electronic tags to locate and fine motorists who are illegally parked.   The kit could also signal the end of residential permits on dashboards and parking meters, company managing director Paul Collins said.  ''If everyone has a chip in their vehicle, we know who they are,'' he said. ''If that chip is aligned to some form of credit card or phone service, you just top up your tag.''

While such residential developments are still a year away, the disabled parking technology is now being tested in Britain by the City of Edinburgh and supermarket chain Sainsbury's.  And the company, whose chairman is the Computershare founder Chris Morris, will soon start talks with Australian airports, hospitals, shopping centres and councils.  Instead of carrying disabled parking permits, drivers carry electronic tags that are read by sensors in parking bays.  If the sensors cannot detect a tag, they send a message to parking officers, who issue fines.

The technology would change people's behaviour, Collins said.  ''There has always been an issue with disabled parking,'' he added. ''People will look at these disabled parks and say, 'I am going to get caught, I'm not going to park there'.  ''When we put sensors in, the abuse goes down immediately.''  The technology would also eliminate the need for parking inspectors to constantly patrol the streets, Collins said.

Sandi Havekotte, whose 13-year-old son Aidan has cerebral palsy, said she often struggled to find a disabled parking space.  ''A few years ago we arrived at a shopping centre and a lovely shiny red convertible pulled next to us in a disabled spot,'' she said.  ''He was young and athletic and had just ducked into the bank. My younger son, Ryan, who was eight at the time, told him off. There was no apology.'' 

Disability organisation Scope said a growing number of people were misusing disabled parking bays.
''It is always a cause of frustration for people we support,'' Scope business enterprise general manager Tom Baxter said.


http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/6198352/Sensor-tech-targets-parking-rogues

Rugby Cup Parking in New Zealand

All is in readiness for World Cup parking in New Zealand

With the Rugby World Cup only one sleep away here in Auckland, I have to admit that the mind does stray from the job at hand and the tasks that revolve around increasing revenue off a 6m x 2.5m block of land in the CBD are of minor concern today. The anticipation of such a big event in a small country like New Zealand is anticipation of an All Black win rather than the crowds of people who will flood the city for the opening night and the planned entertainment over the next 2 months. The plans are in place, the flags are all up, the rules have been published in the newspapers. And yet I allow myself a little rub of the hands as I think of the people flowing through Auckland Airport, through a car park in our portfolio, into the CBD and one of the many car parks that belong to the company and hopefully not too many into the Hospital, yet another car park in the portfolio. For parking, this will be a big event as well. All is in readiness.


A vague comparision with New Zealand and one of the major rugby challangers for the coveted rugby crown, South Africa, is a small trip into rugby/parking fantasy, especially since I have never been to SA.

New Zealand has mostly two main commercial rivals in the parking business, with a group of smaller businesses and local councils in the melee also. The 'Red' Parking company is by far the largest of the companies and is based out of Australia while being owned out of Hong Kong. They have a dominant market share created by being one of the first on the scene and has held over many years. The 'blue' Parking company is a fierce rival and has a large market share in the Auckland and Wellington markets.


The local councils are present and at varying levels of competency, mostly measured by their requirement to compete. An example of this is the Auckland City Council which has just spent many millions upgrading its very large CBD sites with the latest in technology from SkiData equipment, Meter-Eye vehicle guidance systems, a fully functional centralised control room, major over-road VMS signage for empty bay counting on the main roads into the city and dynamic signage at each car park. The investment has extending to Meter-Eye in streets and off street which may lead to a far smaller enforcement team as the signals from the meters lead fewer officers directly to cars overstaying their welcome in the busy retail precincts.


At the other end of the scale, tourist town Taupo, decided not to go down the track of charging for street parking and introduced the same meters to signal the end of your 60 minute stay to an enforcement officer, who would write you an infringement notice on the spot. There are the small vacant development lots with a pay and display meter but mostly parking in New Zealand is high tech as a result of high labour costs and high competition.


Apart from labour costs, I suspect their also may be one or two other differences between parking in South Africa and New Zealand, being the resistance to towing vehicles and resource consenting.


There is a general move away from towing in New Zealand as property law allows the owner to display terms and conditions upon entering the site. If you don’t abide by those terms and conditions, the owner can level an infringement fee similar to a fine as a local officer might level, for breach of contract. There is now a lot more revenue in levelling infringements than there is in accepting a ‘commission’ for allowing a tow truck company to operate out of your site and is a major growth area in parking revenue.


Resource Consents are an area where the local council enforces the ‘use’ of the land in the CBD and if parking is not a permitted activity, as deemed by the Resource Management Act, then the parking company must apply for a ‘departure from the consent’ to operate a commercial car park. The result of this is that the future of the small car park being set up on a development site in the city has now gone.


I do suspect that one thing will always be the same between South Africa and New Zealand and anywhere else in the world for that matter, the public will still resist paying for parking and we, as professionals, will still have to be on our toes in this business and the rugby competition will be fierce. All is in readiness.