Parking 2.0

In How to Handle Parking and Parking in TOD (Transit Oriented Development) the Transit-Friendly Development newsletter nicely summarizes many state-of-the-art parking management principals. Don Shoup and Todd Litman, two of the brightest minds in parking today, are featured, along with a couple of other experts. While I agree with most of the article, I noticed one significant omission in the section on parking garage design. The article states:

Residents also believe that with structured parking there will be more traffic congestion. Actually, it has been shown that there is less congestion because people immediately go to the deck to park, rather than cruise through town looking for spaces.

While this makes intuitive sense, it only works if the parking is priced correctly. There are numerous examples of nearly empty parking garages adjacent to fully occupied, and highly congested, city streets - this occurs if the garage is priced higher than the street parking. To get drivers to move promptly into garages, rather than cruising to find a street space, the garage must be less expensive than the street, potentially by a large margin.

Future Tech News notes that you can use Google Street View to, at least sometimes, read the parking restriction signs at your destination. Of course, this requires that your destination be in one of the cities that Google has photographed, and that the street sign be clear enough to decipher from the Google image. Yeah, I know, you probably won’t be doing this more than the one time inspired by this blog post (if that!). Regardless, the Internet continues to improve many aspects of life, including parking.

I’ve previously blogged about the delightful, temporary conversion of parking spaces into parks. PARK(ing) Day 2007 has a call to action - you too can take the “ing” out of parking! I absolutely agree with the organizer’s assertion that:

Around the nation, inexpensive curbside parking results in increased traffic, wasted fuel, and more pollution. It’s time to rethink the way streets are used!

Making a parking space into a park is one way of rethinking. Another is charging the fair market price for parking spaces. Many (most?) cities charge too little for their parking - citizens should be outraged at this wasteful subsidy to automobile drivers. Thus, I join the call to rise up and protest wasteful parking management practices!

Grush Hour is where Bern Grush, Founder and CTO of Skymeter, blogs about parking, traffic, and the technological/economic solutions to related problems. Welcome Bern, its nice to have another voice blogging about these important topics. As always, you can find Bern’s blog, and others related to parking, in the Parking Blogs section of my Parking 2.0 blog (on the right).

Steven Landsburg has a great, short piece in Slate entitled Why parking your car is more environmentally destructive than driving it. He discusses something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently - the various costs to society of poor parking management practices, and the potential benefits to be derived from improving those practices. For instance, what is the difference in terms of revenue generation, job creation, and quality of life improvements between devoting approximately 350 square feet of land to provide one parking space versus devoting that land to retail space, office space, housing space, or park space? I’ve not done the math, but I’m guessing Steve Landsburg will be doing it in his new book, and I’m guessing that the parking use will come out dead last! Have you seen any analysis of this type? If so, please post a link in the comments.

A new report of the US Department of Transportation entitled Advanced Parking Management Systems: A Cross-Cutting Study is available online in web and PDF format. I’ve just skimmed the report so far, and while I’ve noticed a number of inaccuracies, missing vendors, and missing projects, it still seems like a useful overview.

Normally I’ll keep this blog to discussion of parking in general, but I can’t resist letting you know that Spark Parking has been featured in an article on the Discovery Channel website entitled Find Parking With Your Cell Phone. Now, back to our regularly scheduled blogging…

The San Francisco Chronicle reports on a Port parking study that revealed that “motorists who park at meters along San Francisco’s waterfront pay less than half the time”. In San Francisco overall, another study suggested that meters were collecting less than 1/4 of the revenue they could be generating. Where is the outrage? What if 3/4 of all restaurant diners left without paying their bills? The article notes that the city can’t seem to hire enough enforcement officers to ensure that parking payments are made - I’m guessing that is because the city pays its PEOs far too little for the abusive working conditions they must endure. If the parking payments, and citation revenue, were directed first to paying the salaries of this brave city employees, I’m sure we’d be able to hire and retain the people needed to ensure that parkers pay their fair share for using our city resources.

StreetFilms has a great 6.5 minute interview with parking guru Donald Shoup. If you are curious about his management principals, but can’t bring yourself to read his book, I suggest you spend a few minutes with this well-produced video. One highlight - a recent survey in SoHo (in New York) suggested that nearly 30% of the traffic on the road was people looking for parking! Motorists, bicyclists, pedestrians, really everyone should be furious that their politicians have so poorly managed the important public resource of parking as to cause nearly a third of traffic to be essentially unnecessary! In a well-managed parking system, there would always be available spaces, and virtually all of that “parking search traffic” would be taken off the streets. Anyway, go watch the video, then come back here and leave your thoughts in the comments.

The CarHarbor Blog has a post (the first in many months) detailing why CarHarbor will not be opening for business. Interestingly, the same issues that CarHarbor identified with a distributed parking marketplace may also affect other startups in the space, like SpotScout. Though CarHarbor dosen’t mention SpotScout by name, its clear that the “Execution, not Hype” comment is about them. Its actually somewhat amazing - have you ever seen a startup get so much press, so far in advance of actually offering its service, as SpotScout has?! Anyway, thanks CarHarbor, for raising awareness among the public in using innovative technological and marketplace approaches to solve a pain so many of us share. We’ll miss ye, and we hardly knew ye!

I’m looking forward to visiting the new robotic parking garage noted in Engadget’s recent posting. I hope, for everyone involved, that this garage doesn’t suffer the issues that plagued the similar garage in Hoboken, NJ. The prices for parking in this New York facility are interesting - they seem roughly similar to prices in the area, which suggests that the increased construction and operational costs of this facility are offset by the increased density of paying customers. Of course, for another city with lower monthly or per-day rates, that math wouldn’t work - anyone know where the break-even point is? This garage is a project of Automotion Parking Systems, which claims 90 projects worldwide - I wonder how many are actually constructed, versus in the planning process…

In The Parking Fix, the Wall Street Journal details how Don Shoup’s parking management principals, principally pricing parking to 85% occupancy, is being implemented in Redwood City, CA, Portland, OR, and other places.

“But the idea has plenty of detractors, starting with those who say the price increases fall disproportionately on people for whom they are a hardship.

Is this stating the obvious, or am I missing something? The real question is should we be offering a subsidy to drivers, in the form of underpriced parking? Parking was never free, it was just paid for by others - now that those actually using the parking are being asked to pay its fair price (as determined by the marketplace) is this a disproportionate burden?

“Also, many market-based plans eliminate minimum parking requirements for developers, which critics say gives developers a profit boost and creates a parking crunch down the line.”

Eliminating minimum parking requirements may indeed create a parking crunch later, but I think in many cases this delay is actually a positive thing. See my previous blog post on this topic.

The Portland Transport Blog reports that Don Shoup will be giving his quintessential High Cost of Free Parking talk at the Portland State University this Friday, Feb 2, at noon. He is a great speaker and I encourage you to attend if you are in the area.

The Seattle Times writes about another example of a US city considering removing the rules that require certain amounts to parking to be provided by new businesses and buildings. A post on the excellent Portland Transport blog discusses the Seattle article and similar rules in Portland - be sure to scroll down to read the comments on the Portland Transport blog posting, as there is excellent discussion of the pros and cons of this “market-based” approach to parking requirements.

I think much of the debate on this topic centers, fundamentally, around a single factor - our relative willingness to tolerate time-lag, and thus “money-lag”, in addressing parking issues. Let me explain: In the traditional world of parking requirements, we try to solve problems before they occur, but we spend more than is generally required to do so. Parking requirements are “calculated” (I’m being generous with that term) to provide sufficient parking for the related building users at almost all times. This means building more parking that is typically consumed - as noted in the Seattle article, parking requirements for grocery stores were set about 50% higher than the observed usage. In this traditional parking requirements approach, there are rarely problems of insufficient parking (instead, there are more typically problems associated with too much parking) and the parking “problem” caused by the new development is solved before the development opens its doors.

In the new marked-based approach to parking, where requirements are removed and developers or business owners are allowed to decide for themselves how much parking to provide, we face a different time-lag issue. I believe that as market-based approaches proliferate, we’ll see some problems related to insufficient parking. On the Portland Transport blog a commenter notes this has already happened in their neighborhood. Those problems will, inevitably, be solved as time goes by - either parking will be provided by for-profit parking operators, drivers will shift to other modes, or the business that generated the parking demand will depart the area. All of these solutions, however, face a time-lag issue - they can only occur AFTER the parking problem has manifested itself. On the other hand, these solutions have a major “money-lag” benefit - they didn’t require spending on “predicted” solutions before the problem was apparent, and they’ll probably be more efficient uses of capital once the solutions are implemented. Why more efficient? Partially because they simply occur later (a dollar spent 3 years from now will be cheaper than a dollar spent today), and partly because the solutions will be much better matched to the problems (ie the grocery store won’t build 3 spaces when only 2 were needed, they’ll build 2, thus saving that 1 space’s cost).

So, the debate in the parking requirements vs marked-based approach should really be around what level of time-lag, between problem identification and solution implementation, are we willing to tolerate, which is another way of saying what level of wasted investment are we willing to tolerate. So, what level are you willing to tolerate?

The Parking Network details yet another online parking marketplace set to launch soon. YouCanPark.com helps connect drivers in the UK with owners of parking spaces that would like to sell them. I wish all the online parking marketplace entrepreneurs well, as a fellow parking entrepreneur, but I’m still not convinced that they’ll be able to make a living selling parking online. My main concern is that the services seem to work best for monthly, or at least regular, parking. If you need a monthly spot near your home or work, you can often walk or drive around looking for garages or lots that advertise “monthly parking available”. I’m sure there are a few areas where insufficient monthly parking is available, and those will be helped by these sites, but most areas in which parking is in short supply tend to have paid parking options that are easy to find without going online. For one-time parking (like when you are going to a meeting across town) I’m not at all sure that the parking marketplace website can improve the parking search process so much that drivers will prefer to find parking online before they leave their home or office, rather than just looking for it when they arrive at their destination like they’ve done for many decades. As noted above, I’m not yet convinced one way or the other, and if I’m missing something here, please use the comments to teach me and the other readers why online parking marketplaces are going to succeed.

Update: Whoops, I left out yet another another (yeah, I meant that) online parking marketplace I recently learned about - ParkMatch, which seems to be initially focusing on San Francisco.