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!

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.

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?

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?

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!

Boing Boing, one of the most popular blogs on the Internet, recently posted a summary of an article in the San Francisco Chronicle about a trial of Mobile License Plate Recognition for finding parking ticket scofflaws. This technology and application is generally well known to people in the parking industry, but the rest of the world is just becoming aware.

The article quotes the cost of the MLPR hardware and software as $92,000 - as a San Francisco taxpayer, I find this to be a big waste of money, as perfectly capable MLPR systems are available for half that amount!