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
