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.

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 ...........

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

Retail Parking …….. It shows no one is 'getting it' ....... yet.

Retail parking is all about capacity, which directly relates to footfall.  You can even work out average spend per car and per car park.

All of these views, including the British Parking assoc, are commenting and making suggestions on physical asset design, not parking operations design.  This means that if you have 100 spaces in a mall, and you overfill them, no one will enjoy the experience but more importantly, you don't increase footfall, and therefore revenues in the mall.  This is the norm for malls.  By comparison if you have 50 spaces on-street (normally much less capacity) then the local shops are suffering through a lack of footfall. 

An answer is to increase the turnover to achieve a desired occupancy rate over a period of the day to make the car parks as productive a possible, for as long as possible.  This means the price might need to change a couple of times a day to encourage shopping in the High St at shoulder times, by price or time restriction (just means revenue comes through Enforcement not Operations). 

 

A key understanding is that if you have 100 spaces and there are 150 cars seeking a spot, you still only have 100 shoppers, not 150....so why overfill them?  Conversely, if you have if you only have 50 cars, the parking operation is equally as badly run.

The parking operation needs to be designed to allow for as many shopping parking opportunities as possible without having restrictions set too short or too long or prices too high or low.  This might take some trial and error.

Once the best mix of price and/or restriction is found, to achieve 85% occupancy, then you need to work on increasing capacity, which is an asset issue, not a parking issue. 

When everyone understands the science behind it, the issue is depoliticised as the emotion is removed, and it becomes an economics issue … where it should be.

 

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/eric-pickles-calls-for-more-town-centre-parking-spaces

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

Parking Operations Design - A Lesson

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

 

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

 

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

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

  

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

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

 

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

 
 

Kevin Warwood

Parking Operations Designer

 

 

 

These views are my own.

'Go-for-Goldilocks' - Free Parking Not the Best Way to Attract Shoppers?

'Go-for-Goldilocks'

Parking is not the main reason people go shopping, in fact it is well down the list, but retailers would make you think that it is the only thing that is between them and oblivion.

The best option, is to 'Go-for-Goldilocks'.  That is change your pricing and/or restrictions to get the right number of cars in the right number of spaces.

You may have read a previous blog where I mentioned that if you have an overload situation, as you do in many suburban malls, having cars circulating in car parks does NOT increase the number of shoppers; you have shoppers plus motorists waiting to be shoppers, and hating the experience being provided.


















The best way to approach parking for shoppers is to get the time restriction right and then to enforce that.  You can get more shoppers by turning your parking bays over faster, not by increased queuing.


Free Parking Not the Best Way to Attract Shoppers?


Kevin Warwood