An Arabian Tarriance

Hi everyone,

After 3 years away in the Middle East, I’m back in New Zealand and back in the Parking Business again.  It was an education in the Middle East and over the next few weeks, I will detail some of the things I saw and learned while I was away.  Its sufficient to say that they do things differently there!

I managed Queen Alia International Airport parking while in Jordan.  Unknown to most Antipodeans, this is the number 1 airport in the region.  Yes, better rated than Dubai and wrangling for top spot with Abu Dhabi Airport.  QAIA were number 1, knew it and wanted to keep it that way.  The attention to detail and concentration on customer journeys was well known because of the stream of other airports visiting the site to see what they were doing so well.  QAIA parking was good.

I also spent time managing the car parking at King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.  Not as efficient as their middle eastern cousins when it came to understanding how parking worked, how it linked into the passengers journey and how to optimise the resource.  A lot of the issues were the way the management and the procurement processes worked in the Kingdom.  This is a storyt for another time.

I’m happy to hear from all of the readers of this blog and its good to be home.

Kevin

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

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

Frog Opens High Tech Car Park ...

Palmerston North has become home to what may be the world’s most high-tech carpark, where the amount drivers pay depends on how many spaces are available.

The 33-space carpark in the city’s Church Street has been kitted out with solar-powered sensors by local parking technology firm Frogparking that can tell which parks are occupied. Drivers pay for parking through their smartphone.

Frogparking has been providing ticketless parking systems to Palmerston North for a few years, but director Don Sandbrook said the new system was its most advanced yet, with cheaper parking if there were lots of spaces available and higher prices if they were nearly all taken. The tariff ranges from 50 cents to $2 an hour.

Regular patrons can use a GPS-enabled windscreen tag that will automatically bill their credit card, but there is no cash option.

Sandbrook said there was plenty of on-street parking nearby for “little old ladies” who found the technology complicated. “If you don’t have a smartphone, we don’t want you to park in the carpark.”

He believed everyone would be paying for all parking by smartphone within 10 years. “There will be no other way.”

Drivers pay only for the time they are parked and local retailers can send codes to customers’ smartphones that entitle them to have their parking fees refunded if they take up shopping offers.

A local cafe, Cafe Moxies, has been the first to do that, but three other retailers are offering parkers in-store discounts.

Sandbrook said Palmerston North could become the “world’s innovation hub” for the parking industry and help cities around the world revive their retail centres.

- © Fairfax NZ News

Read Article Here ...........

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.

Breaking Through the 'Google' Glass Ceiling - The Future of Parking

Oh, wouldn’t it be a great tool to be able to predict what might happen in the future and what a great fool you would be to think you can actually do it. To see coming proceedings as mere extrapolations of current thoughts, information and events, then put them all together into some kind of sense, would rank you along side ancient fortune-tellers, soothsayers and wealthy card players. Neither really exists as randomness tends to catch up with you, although some always say they have the gods on their side as they walk through the casino doors. It would be great to be able to do that but to understand that technology will bring many changes is not the realm of a clairvoyant, but merely a pragmatist. To determine what the revolution will be, sometimes feels like it is within the realm of a clairvoyant as most of the recent revolutions were out of left field.

Predicting what car parking operations might look like in the future is also an exercise in futility as there are so many functions and disciplines that touch parking. All of these functions and disciplines have their own champions to push the boundaries of the accepted frontier and the discoveries of technology and methodology in all of these disciplines will radiate an enlightened knowledge for parking to bathe in. Who would have thought that the cordless vacuum cleaner, light emitting diodes and infrared ear thermometers would have come from the space program? The future of parking can be anything, but having said that it does appear to be in the field of technology that the changes are coming at an ever increasing rate.

Being at the end of this book, it is appropriate to look into a crystal ball and see what might be on the horizon. What are the harbingers of things to come? There tends to be two different types of future products or themes to keep an eye on, work place trends and global trends that touch parking.

Workplace trends that will affect the parking industry are related to what our customers will be doing in the future. The rise of the female worker, longer working lives (but from home), the appearance of increased processing power in mobile phones, global climate change pressures, increasing frequencies of economic crises of various sorts, rise and resistance to social media (what’s the next big thing?), working from home, increased PT use, self driven cars and cloud computing, are all themes occurring now and affect the parking industry directly. Expectations change as the latest widget that gets sold via the internet television at home, is expected to start to pervade the parking industry, by demand of the customer immediately. I have confidence that we, as an industry, will keep up with customer demands to be engaged in different ways because if you don’t, someone else will.

Global trends will always overtake an industry, if it is not exposed to better, faster ways of doing things. Some new ideas appear like a tidal wave rather than an image of a cowboy slowly moseying his way into the foreground from the horizon. Global trends when accepted and embraced by an industry tend to permeate the suppliers and operators of an industry as they embrace the changes to enhance their own service or product offerings. If they don’t embrace it, the technology will replace the industry.

The explosion in communications equipment and its increased processing power has been phenomenal. Quad-core mobile phones are now the norm, a similar amount of computing power to what NASA used to land Apollo 13 on the moon! You can get an App for almost anything now. It almost appears that app-creators have run out of stuff to invent in cool businesses and have started to look around at a business like parking. Not that parking is not cool, it has just always been the poor cousin.

Self driven cars are here. The results of having these machines about require deep reflection by the parking industry. Get alongside these developments or get left behind will be the call. I still have some confidence that the mum and dad user will still require a space to park their oil powered old clunker. The gradual pervasion of the electric and hybrid car, into the national vehicle fleet, will speed up to a fast jog, before moving at a bolt-like pace in the years to come. Its how soon that will occur that should occupy minds more immediately. A change over must occur as climate change pressures mount. I know my mum will be driving her old car for many more years yet. There will still be millions of these cars around for some time. I would be more worried if I was a taxi driver than a car park operator as companies can afford to replace fleets of taxis with self driven cars before fleets of mums and dads, replace theirs.

I tend to think that the self driven car will create more traffic and congestion than we need. As the driver decides that the inner city parking fees are too expensive, they prefer to pay the price of extra fuel and send the cars home again or to a lot at the fringes of the city. This will have the affect of doubling the trips made each day and creating congestion on the way out of the city as well into the city.

Another looming battle will be the conflict between car haters and the pragmatists. The pragmatists will slowly move into their eco-cars but the car haters will still enjoy thrashing any person who owns an oil driven vehicle or an electric vehicle alike. Green cars and green parking garages will not satiate these people. This would not normally be an issue for most, but the fact that most of these people are in positions in the City or Councils and in national bodies will create a real issue between the normal traveller and the various Government bodies. I have seen the goodwill gestures of the public attending the public meetings after the earthquakes in Christchurch, proffer up suggestions on how they would like to see their city in 25 years time and the haters then turn that into such a change that the original submitters may very well say, “that’s not what I asked for!”. These issues are coming around the world.

Micromanagement of parking is here now. With the advent of the ‘cloud’ and the increased database and processing power that it provides, means that we can now search for information and calculate results on a giant computer stuck somewhere in a air-condition warehouse in the middle of a desert, and have the results piped to our mobile phones or tablets in milliseconds. It means we are able to run calculations on occupancies and prices almost instantaneously. Zone parking is the modern way of dividing up and managing the city’s parking resources. A zone is created around a major parking ‘load creator’ whatever it might be, university, airport or retail precinct, and the occupancies are responded to by a locally derived price. With modern parking technology, the zones can be any size or shape drafted onto a GIS platform for visual interpretation. City and private operations managers can now offer greater ROI by pushing occupancies to a much more intense level. 85% occupancy might already be a thing of the past, as we aim for higher levels. Micromanagement of parking is here but we have to wait for city officials to catch up.

Another example of technology making headway into parking and a battle I am looking forward to is the NFC versus Pay by Widget battle. I am already hearing people saying they are coming down on one side or another, or even skipping one technology altogether to wait for the other to triumph. I suspect there will be a shake out in the industry but there will be room for both. It won’t be solved next year but it will be bare-knuckled fight to watch. I suspect that with the computing power of the phone and its links to the cloud, they phone will win but don’t underestimate the power of the parking equipment makers. Parking equipment makers will always want NFC as it is an add-on to their equipment, but Pay by widget can be had by the customer simply owning a phone. We currently have 7 billion people on this planet and 6 billion phones. The big budgets of the equipment makers will offer up a tantalising message but in the end, the mobile phone will win as it connects to more people.

Outside of the Pay by Phone versus NFC debate is a new intruder. I’ve watched the arrival of products such as Google Glass over the last few months and wondered how this will change what we do in parking. I have not used it but have seen it on the many Youtube videos and they like. Can Glass enable parking users? Will third-party apps be there to help do so? Will the equipment companies latch on to this technology to drive the next revolution in parking?

There is a lot of interest in Glass use by many professions that require a ‘hands free’ approach to what they are doing, but the biggest group of interested parties will be drivers. Surgeons, CEO’s, and mechanics will have access to hands-free and real-time critical information. Some of the changes we will notice may be,

• Google at your eye tips – to answer any query while you are awake.

• Instant photos – never be without your camera or be too slow to get the shot you area after again.

• Mobile calls while driving – In many countries, its illegal to drive and talk on the phone, although that doesn’t seem to stop some people.

• Google maps in an instant – never get lost again.

• Google translator for travel – Read the food labels in French or Chinese with Glass on.

• Live traffic and news feeds – figure out a way around the jam you’re in by seeking alternatives routes and see why the traffic is stopped by the live news feed.

• Google calendar – make your appointment on the run. Forget the written diary from now on.

• Contact lens makers may become redundant – You will wear glasses, so no more contacts.

• iPhones may become a thing of the past – You just don’t need them anymore.

• They will look as good as Versace … eventually

• Parking - Find your car park by the use of one of the many parking apps or link directly to the parking equipment to open the barrier gate and even pay for your parking by accessing your bank account through your Glass.

The largest unanswered question is whether apps, called Glassware, will be there to boost Glass adoption. I believe that as soon as the price starts to come down, early adopters will drive a trickle of app creation and then the pay by phone techs and others will transfer to Glass apps.

Glass will revolutionise parking technology again, in a similar way that pay by phone and self driven cars are about to.

The entry into the market of technology giants has been a major move in the last couple of years. 3M, Xerox, Morgan Stanley and Google in the future are huge names in technology and finance and are related to other, more glamorous industries. They are infiltrating the parking business and bringing with them an intelligence that can cross-pollinate into this industry that is already not fallow of good ideas, but limited in the ability to apply them and limited by a lack of vision to buy the good ideas. These guys bring size, power and brands with them. Most of these companies have strayed into parking via transport and traffic but they are now here. A side affect of this entry into the market by global giants is the assortment of ivy leaguers they bring with them.

With all of these options, there are three major challenges for all parties in parking. Firstly, the one challenge for the parking practitioner is to push the boundaries of and embrace new technology to create a solution for the customer that extends knowledge and more intensely improves parking utilization. The result being increased ROI.

A huge challenge for the parking practitioner is to get the parking methodology right, to suit the designed parking plan. Then the parking technology decisions, made after the methodologies are chosen, area an easy choice made from the point of finding equipment and technology that will suit your plan’s goals. The result is increased ROI, although this wont be from parking but from the customers activity that parking supports.

A final challenge is one for parking customers, and that is to rely on the practitioners to get the choices right, to keep up to date with changes. Not easy since most people think parking is simple, easy and still adequate with single-head meters.

Parking is now sexy. Then again, I always thought it was.

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

TDM Will Double Traffic Congestion in the Future

TDM will double the traffic into town in the future…. That’s not the affect its supposed to have?

Most of my ‘parking’ working life has been primarily about trying to optimise the 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 with the tipping point of too many customers demanding spaces because the facility’s promotion and operations are too successful.  Then I can put the prices up and start all over again.

Transport Demand Management just passes on poor Road Corridor Management to Parking

Imagine how surprised I was when I started to work in a city environment, not just about parking operations anymore, but being surrounded by Traffic Engineers and Transport Planners who spoke about using parking as a transport demand management tool.  To the lay person, this means artificially fiddling with the price at a facility to discourage customers, to consequently force them to take the bus, train, bicycle or suffer the fake prices.

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 in space or in time.  I get this.  I really do.  This should be about encouraging a different method of travel through enticements, attractiveness of the product and lifestyle or even competing values, not about hitting people over the head with the blunt mallet of price for parking.

This is an issue that should be solved in other areas, such as road corridor operations or in public transport operations, not parking operations.  It feels very much like the upstream road corridor, PT design and traffic operations have not been done well and the result is to pass it on to parking operations to clean up!  I suggest the answer is sharpening up the up-stream issues first and solving the problems there, rather than have it passed onto someone, somewhere else to resolve.  This is designing a system to run inefficiently on purpose!

The benefits of having a city parking operation that runs efficiently are to have facilities run for the benefit of the customer, the equipment and facility’s capital (tax dollars) are spent well and not wasted and run inefficiently, technology is then allowed to deliver a service that is tailored to the needs of the remaining customers and competition will produce a better service to the city.  The cons of having an inefficiently run parking operation are plain to see, poor service, spiralling costs and a black hole where increasing amounts of money disappears into and the whole is worth less.

Self Drive cars will double the Traffic Congestion

In the coming modern world, the time, distance and place (TDP) road pricing methodology, 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 the BMW’s and the Audi’s of the word are quickly moving to a system of auto-drive vehicles that can drive into town, drop the passenger off at work and then drive out to a fringe parking lot or back home again, not using the inner city car park with its artificially inflated prices.  These new vehicles will make four trips into and out of the city each day, in effect doubling the traffic in the city from what we have now.  This is not the affect TDM is supposed to have. 

Congestion charging or tolls on roads will be better suited to solving the travel demand issues, not parking.

Kevin Warwood

Parking Operations Designer

These views are my own.

$300k Damage by Cars Parked on Berm.

Streets in Tauranga CBD are lined with cars parked on the roadside and on grass berms on weekdays as motorists try to avoid parking fees.  Damage up at $300k 



Read More Here








These veiws are my own.

New 'Work in Parking Worldwide' Group created.

 

A new group has been created on the Linkedin platform.  It's called Work in Parking Worldwide.



The aim of the group is to provide a place where all of those people interested in working in parking or those who have parking related vacancies, can put these posts up in one place. 

Parking is a specialised field and it needs to have a place of its own for specialists to go and for those who are not specialists to review the current trends and vacancies in parking related employment.

Kevin Warwood



Check out the Work in Parking Worldwide Group Here

Lord Kelvin said ...........

Lord Kelvin said, "If you can not measure it, you can not improve it."  I must congratulate the New Plymouth City Council for taking a pragmatic approach to parking in the city and not falling into the trap of putting plasters on the symptoms.  Measure what you have happening first, then make some changes.

New Plymouth City Council has a simple parking operation that is combined with the enforcement wing of the activity.  Some cities have strayed into the area of thinking their parking operation, is the enforcement wing.  Not so.  The parking operation comes first (however it has been designed or not!), then the enforcement of the parking operation must occur.  Enforcement supports operations.

So it is important to understand exactly what is going on out there by monitoring the signals form on-street, off-street, public, private and institutional parking.  In this case, it seems that the time restriction may in fact prove to be too short to suit the businesses in that neighbourhood, but they wouldn’t have known that if they hadn’t taken time to collect the data correct and then see what the flavour of the feedback from the public looked like, to the enforcement of the old rules.  Bear in mind, this is just technology making the existing rules more accurate.

With the sensor technology, they can now review the average length of stay and the turnover of customers.  This will start to build a picture, in each neighbourhood, of the requirements of each business area or precinct, and that may be to amend the current time restrictions.  Remember the purpose of parking is primarily to support and facilitate economic activity and growth.  This means that access to the city for retail, leisure, well-being and commercial activities, must be optimised, or just the right amount of cars in just the right amount of spaces.

One method of doing this is to divide the city into zones large enough to affect the main parking load or driver in the area, and then create parking time restrictions (or prices) that will suit and be synchronous with the activities in the area.  What may happen is that the retailers will want longer time restrictions until they get to the point where the volume of customers falls through a lack of turnover in the car parks, then they will want the time restrictions smaller until their customers can’t stay long enough to make big purchases.  It’s a balancing act the Council is trying to achieve, but with the collection of accurate data, they will be able to start somewhere and then move in the right direction.

New Plymouth City Council will get a bit of stick as they go through the process of collecting the data and then making the improvements that will ensure the local businesses will be supported, but the improvements will help support the activities of the local area.  To close with a pun, Lord Kelvin would be interested in the work being done to measure the temperature of car park use here.

Kevin Warwood

Read More Here

These views are my own.