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).
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 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.
Its so exciting to see Shoup in action! A recent article in the News & Observer says the city council in Raleigh, North Carolina, is considering a study of removing parking requirements for new development. Instead, developers would decide how much parking to build, based on their project type and their forecasts of market response. This is exactly the type of market based parking management approach that Don Shoup, and others (including me!) support. What do you think - should developers be allowed to decide how much parking to build, or are their interests so misalligned with the public interest that regulation must force them to build or supply some pre-determined amount of parking?
Frank Gruber discuss parking startup ParkWhiz on his blog Somewhat Frank. I’ve chatted with the ParkWhiz guys (very friendly, by the way) and I like what they are doing. As Frank notes, they seem to be playing in a similar space to some other Web 2.0 / Parking 2.0 startups like CarHarbor and SpotScout, though so far I like ParkWhiz’s business model the best. Go ahead and sign up on the ParkWhiz site to stay informed as they launch their services in the next few months, and hey, while you are at it why not sign up to stay informed of Spark Parking’s latest news as well!
Sorry for the short notice (and the lack of blogging) but I thought you might like to know that my parking guru Donald Shoup is presenting a 1-hour lecture on The High Cost of Free Parking this Friday, Sept 8 at 4pm on the UC Berkeley campus. This would be a great way to absorb the key points of his excellent book without all that pesky reading time!
Payments News reports that Newport’s Card Accepting Parking Machines Frustrate Motorists - while the entire article is unavailable (except to paid subscribers) the summary at Payments News is not surprising given the remarkably poor user interfaces and reliability I’ve seen in some multi-space meter systems.
If anyone does find the full article available online for free, please post a link in the comments below - thanks!
A nice combination of LPR, GPS, WiFi (maybe?) and GIS (I hope!) is detailed in this brief article: Parking control in Amsterdam goes digital
Getting the residential parking permit for my new neighborhood in San Francisco was not terribly difficult, but it did involve an in-person visit to the San Francisco parking office (during normal business hours only!) with some associated paperwork to prove my residence location. I’d say Amsterdam has a great improvement on the typical residential parking permit process.
I spent the last couple days at the O’Reilly Where 2.0 conference in San Jose - the event was excellent and inspiring, and if you’ve not yet been to an O’Reilly Conference, I suggest you do so soon!
I was lucky enough to get a ride to and from the event from Mason Inman, a freelance science journalist (hey, hire him!). On Tue, Mason parked in an $18/day lot about a block from the event site. On Wed, we parked about two blocks away, and paid $5. The San Jose Downtown Parking map shows the remarkable variation in parking pricing - have a look at the bottom left corner of the map, where Almaden Blvd meets the curve in the Guadalupe River. There are four parking facilities touching that block of Alamaden, and their prices for all day parking are $20, $18, $12, and $5!
What causes this huge variation (4x!) in parking pricing? It sure isn’t location, because these four facilities are essentially co-located. It is mostly access to information - from in front of any of the four, there is no way of knowing that you may have a cheaper nearby option (unless you have the parking map in front of you). Downtown San Jose has excellent parking signs, directing drivers to their many parking options from just about any point on the downtown roads, but the signs only tell drivers where to park, and they miss out on that critical decision factor - price.
I don’t know if this is intentional, but it is clearly imperfect - Mason was quite unhappy that he paid $18 to park the first day, especially when he found out that a much cheaper option was available very nearby. This unhappiness translates into damage to the “Downtown San Jose” brand in Mason’s mind. San Jose is attempting to establish it’s downtown as a great place to visit, and if it is going to be successful in this goal, it needs to find a way to price parking rationally, so that drivers don’t feel “cheated” or “stupid” when they discover that they paid far more for parking than they had to. Customer’s experiences of a neighborhood or destination start when they start looking for parking, and if that parking experience is bad… well you know what they say about not having a second chance to make a first impression.
While I’ve been hearing about this technology for a while, this is the first I’ve read of an actual RFID parking permit deployment. Advantages of RFID parking permits? Faster, more accurate permit “reading” and elimination of counterfiets. Read more about it here Hoboken, N.J., Battles Parking Permit Counterfeiting With RFID System
While this is some “cool tech”, I’m still generally against parking permits. Instead, parking that is valuable enough to require “rationing” by permits should instead be sold by the hour. Selling parking by the month tends to encourage overconsumption - after all, if you’ve already paid for the permit, you are actually motivate to park more to get more value from your investment in the permit! I’ll write more on this in the future, and I encourage you to share your comments below on the question - Parking Permits: Good or Bad?
I first learned of a radical new approach to traffic engineering (the design of roads, sidewalks, signs, and other components of infrastructure for automotive travel) in this Wired article from December 2004 Roads Gone Wild. Since then I’ve discussed the concepts with a number of people, most of whom thought the concept was crazy - how could a roadway be made safer by taking away most or all of the things we typically think add safety, like signs, curbs, crosswalks, lights, etc?
This morning I was delighted to come across this video of an apparently typical intersection in India. I can see no sign of any of the traffic engineering elements typical in the USA, Europe, and other areas, yet a relatively high volume of very mixed traffic (from pedestrians to bikes to large trucks) seems to flow very smoothly. About two thirds through the video a white car even drives against the flow of traffic, with no ill effects!
What does this have to do with the (widely varying) subject matter of this blog? It is an example of how reducing attempts to control a situation, while empowering individuals to make decisions, can result in superior results. This works in Indian traffic, and it can work in parking management too - simply allow the market to determine the correct price for parking and it will be neither over nor under-utilized. Leave me a comment if this doesn’t make sense, and I’ll attempt to clarify…
I’ve been thoroughly enjoying UCLA Professor Donald Shoup’s seminal work on parking management humorously entitled The High Cost of Free Parking. Shoup convincingly presents many reasons why parking, as it is typically managed, has some serious problems to overcome, including:
I’m not nearly done with the book, so I’m sure I’ll soon have more key points to add to the list above. We are on the cusp of a revolution in parking management, though like many things in the parking world, this revolution will proceed VERY slowly. More thought’s on Shoup’s book and the future of parking in upcoming posts…
Subscribe to Parking 2.0
You are currently browsing the archives for the Future Commerce category.