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!

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.

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.