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.

I’ve not seen the PAVEMENT PARADISE exhibit in Los Angeles, but I’d like to! If any of you fine readers attend this show, please let the rest of us know what it was like by posting in the comments. With a tag line like the following, I’m sure it is interesting!

An exhibit about the liminal, substanceless, and static space of automotive transience.

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.

The Alternate Side Parking Reader has been blogging about parking, life in New York City, and other items since at least January. I’m happy to see someone else sharing their parking-related thoughts and analysis. I’ve added this blog to my list of parking blogs at www.Parking2.com.

An article entitled Sustainable Parking Structure Will Have Santa Monica Motorists Seeing Green in the LookOut News describes a new parking structure with seemingly impecable environmental credentials. I’m certainly impressed by its features including “photovoltaic roof panels, a storm drain water treatment system, recycled construction materials and energy efficient mechanical systems”. As noted, this may be the nation’s first LEED certified garage - its about time!

I don’t mean to rain on the parade, but I’m less impressed with some other aspects of this project. For starters, the garage has “sweeping city and ocean views” - why in the world was it not built with residential and/or office space around the outside of the structure?! A garage with great views is a wasted opportunity. Santa Monica residents should hold their politicians accountable for wasting these valuable views on such a low-value use as parking.

The cost of the project also seems way too high - even after subtracting the $1.5mil solar system from the $29mil project cost, you are still left with a per parking space cost of over $31,000! Some underground garages, which typically incur the highest construction costs, are built for a per-space price less than that - and they leave the valuable airspace above for higher value development. It is unfortunate that this, the first LEED certified garage, will suggest to the parking industry that environmentally-friendly garages cost much more - I’m guessing that this project will actually do more harm than good when it comes to encouraging the parking garage industry to become more sustainable.

Also noted in the article is a $180mil plan to add 1,712 parking spaces to downtown. While I’m sure this number includes a lot of parking structure rehabilitation, and probably construction of non-parking components like the ground floor retail in this garage, $105,000 each to add parking spaces seems WAY too high a price to pay. I’d imagine that money could be much more effectively spent on Transportation Demand Management efforts to reduce parking demand, rather than on increasing parking supply.

Criticisms aside, I’m excited to see sustainable practices creeping into the parking industry, and I applaud Santa Monica for gathering the political will (and budget!) to make this important project a reality.

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.

Both Boing Boing and Engadget note a pilot project in Raleigh, North Carolina. As described on the website of the firm that made the LED lighting fixtures:

Cree, Inc. and the the City of Raleigh installed Optimized Digital Lighting® lowbay fixtures designed by Lighting Science inside the Raleigh Municipal Building parking deck in December 2006. Progress Energy, Raleigh’s primary electric utility provider, says the floor equipped with LED lights uses over 40 percent less energy than the lighting system it replaced. Plus, according to Progress Energy’s research, the quality of light in the garage is greatly improved.

I can’t find anything in the publicity materials discussing pricing or ROI, so I’m not sure if larger-scale replacement of existing HID or fluorescent lighting with LED lighting in parking garages would be cost effective. However, the product literature does mention an intriguing Energy Savings Sharing Program, described on another web page:

Energy Savings Sharing ProgramSM which allows your organization to experience immediate energy savings by installing Optimized Digital Lighting solutions at no cost. The program pays for itself by sharing the monthly savings between your organization and Lighting Science over the life of the contract.

I recently had some interesting conversations with parking garage owners, managers, and developers regarding garage lighting and energy efficiency. A number of them indicated their belief that LED lighting, while more efficient than any other form, is unsuitable for parking garages due to various intensity and light “spread” issues. The trial installation in Raleigh seems to strongly suggest otherwise, and that LED lighting can actually improve parking garage light quality. Can any of you readers comment on your experience with, or knowledge of, LED lighting in parking garages?

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…