Parking World

The Buses Are Coming to Cairnshill

It is not that often that you see issues that you blog about get fixed. In my blog on October 4 entitled  “If You Build It, They Will Come”  I reported about delays on contracting for bus service that have turned the Cairnshill park-and-ride in Belfast, Northern Ireland, into an empty car park that was allegedly to be used for park-and-share.

That may all change on Monday, November 1, as Translink launches a new dedicated bus service to the car park, making the dream of park-and-ride a reality, assuming Belfast residents accept the seemingly economical cost of £2.20 per day. The bus service will operate every 15 minutes between 7am and 7pm, Monday - Friday.

“I welcome the introduction of this frequent dedicated bus service for the Cairnshill Park and Ride," says Transport Minister, Conor Murphy. "This facility is an important element of the Department's commitment to promote more sustainable travel, by offering commuters on this corridor an alternative for their journey into the city centre."

Murphy says the aim of the park-and-ride is “to encourage more people out of their cars and onto public transport at the busiest times of the day, reducing congestion on city centre streets.”

 

Pete Goldin

 

Parking for Halloween

To get you in the mood for Halloween on Sunday, I found the perfect parking place for the holiday, as well as the upcoming All Soul's Day and Dia de los Muertos.

The Birmingham Post reports that gravestones at St. Paul's, an historic Birmingham church, are literally being used as parking spaces. The reason: there is no money in the budget to move the stones, a cost expected to be about £20,000.

Sorry to take the edge off the Halloween spirit, but, no, there are no actual  graves located under the stones.

See the full article in the Birmingham Post

 

Pete Goldin

Meet and Cheat

Valet parking is all about trust. Once a service provider loses that bond with the customer, all is lost. With that in mind, check out this video from BBC Watchdog investigating what can happen to a car when left with a UK airport meet-and-greet company.

Nice Racks

The City of Ottawa, Canada, is replacing 4000 coin-operated meters with 600 solar-powered pay-and-display machines. Progressive, sustainable. I like it. But what do you do with all the old parkng meters? Ottawa has an answer to that too. According to CBC News, Ottawa starting converting more than 500 the obsolete meters into bike racks last week. It not only solves the problem of meter disposal but also answers the  increasing demand for bike parking in the City.

Yes, you did the math, and there are about 3500 more meters to dispose of but the City promises that none will end up in a landfill. Recycling is the most obvious option here

For this effort,  I am awarding my first unofficial PW Sustainable City Award to Ottawa. Congrats.

Pete Goldin

Poll: Brits Spend Year Looking for Parking

What more proof do you need? Here is a poll that shows that drivers in the UK spend up to a year of their lives looking for parking.

Here are some results:

- 42% of people - and 51% of women - admit they will not attempt to park in a space if another car is waiting behind them;

- 23% often get a passenger to do the parking for them;

- 44% of people, and 48% of women, have "lost" their car as they could not remember where they parked, with Birmingham motorists the most forgetful;

- 50% have gone to the wrong floor or section of the car park to look for their vehicle, while 39% of those have even attempted to get into someone else's car, mistaking it for their own.

I would love to have a similar poll done here in the US. I suggest that parking is more difficult in the UK because the spaces are smaller. One might note that the average car is smaller, but even so, I think the problem is more daunting with a smaller space. This is particularly true in parking garages.

I also suggest that UK drivers may be less patient than US drivers, thus causing some consternation when a person is waiting for another to park. I really don't see too much frustration during a parking situation, unless we are on the fourth go and the driver still can't get the car in the space.

I reread the article and couldn't determine if the "looking for lost car" time was factored into the "looking for parking" time. I did note that the survey was done by NCP, a UK parking operator, and wonder if that's the reason "looking for a cheaper place to park" wasn't listed as a major reason why people spend so long parking.

 

JVH

Pay Per Pollution

Edinburgh disputes that the City's new emissions-based parking permit fees will cause an unnecessary burden to Scottish motorists.

On September 29, I posted a blog entitled "Pay Per Use" in which I quote a rep from the Taypayers' Alliance who said, among other things, "It is simply unfair for Edinburgh council to heap yet more charges on motorists who choose a larger family car."

A press release from the City of Edinburgh Council counters, "The new charging structure will see more than half of permit holders being better off with three quarters being no worse off by the scheme. Only permit holders with the most polluting vehicles or those with a second permit will pay more than they do at present."

Gordon Mackenzie, Transport Convenor for Edinburgh, adds, “As a local authority we have a duty to meet air quality standards and play our part in achieving the target of a 42% reduction in the nation’s CO2 emissions by 2020 as set by the Scottish Parliament.”

“For the Council, this initiative is cost neutral,” he adds. “It is not making any more money but it should help towards achieving our goal of improved air quality and a better environment for residents and visitors to our city.”

 

Pete Goldin

Abu Dhabi's Kind of Town

Apparently, Abu Dhabi owns a majority of the City of Chicago’s parking meters. This is an odd twist to the highly publicized Morgan Stanley deal reported by Parking Today in January 2010, in which the company paid over a billion dollars for the City's future parking meter revenues.

On October 18, Rolling Stone released an exclusive excerpt from the new book Griftopia by Matt Taibbi which outlines how the deal went down.

Taibbi states that on December 1, 2008 the Chicago City Council was formally notified that Mayor Richard Daley made a deal with Morgan Stanley to lease all of Chicago’s parking meters for 75 years, for a lump sum of over $1.15 billion.

The reason was that the City was in a budget crunch and needed to pay for social services.

Taibbi adds that Morgan Stanley put together a consortium of investors  - Chicago Parking Meters LLC - to handle the city's meters.

“There was no mention of who the investors were or who the other bidders might have been,” he says, when the agreement was rushed through City Council approval.

Taibbi calls it a "bait and switch" because even when the investors were finally revealed, "an Abu Dhabi entity" only owned 6% of the contract. Two months after the deal, the ownership structure changed a few times, and Abu Dhabi Investment Authority ended up owning at least 30% of Chicago Parking Meters LLC, according to Taibbi.

Taibbi claims that the City of Chicago undervalued the contract, which was really worth more like $5 billion. In my opinion, that is what this is all about, but Taibbi loses me when he says, "The most obnoxious part of the deal is that the city is now forced to cede control of their streets to a virtually unaccountable private and at least partially foreign-owned company."

This mysterious partially-Abu-Dhabi-based company has upset Taibbi and Chicago residents for several reasons, mostly notably because of a cultural clash that has resulted in no free parking on Christmas. Ostensibly this is because the foreigners do not celebrate our treasured American holidays and want to destroy our way of life? They hate us for our freedom? I don't quite buy it. I don't buy that the sale is akin to placing America's soul in hock. It's just business. But if Taibbi's calculations are correct, it remains a bad business decision for Chicago.

For JVH's perspective, click here to go to the Parking Today blog.

 

Pete Goldin

Aye, Robot

Automated or robotic car parks have not done well in the UK up to now. I don’t want to revisit the debate about the pros and cons of automated versus self park; the simple fact is that, in the UK robotic car parks have not really caught on.  Now however what is probably the biggest robotic car park in the UK has opened in the Cube in Birmingham.  The car park which uses a system designed by German providers Wohr has a capacity of 339 cars and cost a reported £2m.  It is located 20 meters below the Cube development.

Apparently the developers opted for a robotic solution when a conventional solution was ruled out because the space needed for a ramp would have had too big an impact on the ground floor lettable retail space. The car park is not a public facility since users have to first possess a personal tag to gain access; it is claimed that any car can be recovered within 2 minutes.

The Cube is a multi-use development with shops, offices, a rooftop restaurant, a hotel and apartments. In March this year joint developers Birmingham Development Company Limited and Build ability Limited went into administration.

Peter Guest

Valet Parking - Morung Style

The Morung Express is not a paper I read regularly. It covers a corner of the far North East of India squeezed between Bangladesh, China and Myanmar. I suspect visitors from Europe are few and far between. Anyway this worthy journal has just published a story about valet parking Morung style.

At Dhobinalla auto parking lot in Dimapur where the citiy’s auto-rickshaw drivers park, two boys are employed as “auto dhaka chokra” or auto push boys. It seems that as an auto-rickshaw leaves the boys’ job is to push succeeding rickshaws up the line. For this service, the boys get a few pence, and it appears that in total they push about 300 vehicles a day through the lot.

Now the Indian auto-rickshaw is a fine vehicle. True it produces about the same level of pollution as a small city and actually riding on one gives you a real insight to how a kamikaze pilot must have felt, so the boys produce a useful service in terms of their contribution to saving the planet. However the difference between two cultures is well illustrated by the article’s author’s view of the situation. They were concerned that the story showed just how lazy some of his fellow citizens had become. I wondered why, in a country that officially makes child labour illegal, these two boys weren’t at school?

 

Peter Guest

Get in on the Debate

You have a chance to give your opinion about congestion control at the 12^th Annual Australian Parking Convention (APC) in Sydney, Australia.

On November 9, the APC is hosting a debate addressing the issue of how to best manage traffic congestion in urban areas, and exploring the role of parking planning.

Three speakers will give international points of view:

Congestion Pricing: Muriel Hugosson, Head of the Department of Transport Sciences, Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden will outine Stockholm's congestion pricing experience.

Parking Levy: Tim Wyatt, Team Leader for Urban Strategy, Integrated Transport Planning Division, Department of Transport, Western Australia will explain Perth's parking levies.

Market Prices: Donald Shoup, Professor of Urban Planning at UCLA ,will present the case for letting the market set parking prices.

And the best part is that audience members will have a chance to get in on the debate and give their own opinions.

For more information, go to www.apc2010.com.au