Parking World

2011: The Year of the EV

The UK plans to make 2011 The Year of the Electric Car. According to a statement by the UK Communities and Local Government, "Ministers want councils to be at the forefront of an electric car revolution making it easier for drivers to make green choices. They are urging councils to promote electric vehicle charging points in new developments, without making developments unaffordable. Crucially, Ministers are announcing their intention to allow charging points to be built on streets and in outdoor car parks without the need for planning permission."

"It's no good having an electric car if there's nowhere to charge it up, so planning rules have to catch up with car technology," says UK Decentralisation Minister Greg Clark. "At the moment planning permission is required for a charging point, but not for a parking meter. We'll change that so charging points will no longer need planning permission. That way, at a stroke, we remove the bureaucracy - allowing 2011 to be the year when electric motoring is made easy."

Making charging points available across the country is one of the primary factors that can make EVs more attractive to consumers, and the UK sees the local Councils as the key to making this happen. This could have a major impact on the adoption of EVs in the UK.

The UK seems to have taken a very progressive view, as stated by Communities and Local Government Secretary Eric Pickles, "We know people want to buy into the eco friendly car, but they need their politicians to catch up and bring in the infrastructure that makes it a feasible option. That's why we are today urging councils to include charging points in new developments and the Government will relax the need for planning permission for electric charging points on streets, walls and in car parks."

The Government has set aside £400 million to promote ultra-low emission vehicle technologies - including support for consumer incentives, investment in EV recharging infrastructure through the Government's 'Plugged-In Places Scheme' and research and development activities.

 

 

 

Pete Goldin

Goodwill at Holiday Time

It is nice to see a Council admit when they are wrong. The East Riding of Yorkshire Council is reimbursing and/or cancelling 82 tickets valued at about £2,000 issued on New Years Day. The reason for the retraction is confusion around holiday time parking rules, although a BBC report on January 6 calls it a "gesture of goodwill".

In a world where parking authorities are increasingly becoming "cash cows" for governments, it is a relief to see a Council treating parking rules as the social contract they should be, rather than a revenue generator.

 

Pete Goldin

Parking and EVs Go Together

The reality is that EVs can never become fully adopted without incorporating recharging into the parking infrastructures of the world. People will not purchase electric vehicles in mass quantities without a ubiquitous recharging network, and parking is a key element of this network.

I am surprised that private and public parking facilities have not caught onto this opportunity sooner. By opportunity I mean the obvious potential to earn extra money from patrons who use recharging services while parked. I would have thought this would drive the installation of charge points, and maybe it will over the next few years as companies and municipal parking authorities innovate on ways to monetize recharging. I have a feeling that 2011 is going to be a breakout year for EVs and specifically for recharging networks, especially in Europe and Canada. And this, of course, will change the nature of parking, in ways we can already assume, and probably in several ways we have not thought of yet.

As always, Parking World will be keeping an eye on these continued developments and reporting to you.

 

Pete Goldin

You Can't Fight Mother Nature

Check out this sobering video of a flooded parking lot in Toowoomba, South East Queensland, Australia.

 

There’s Tough and There’s Tough

It’s always interesting to read about other people’s problems and how they deal with them, and the tendency for people not to be able to see the wood for the trees, as the saying goes. This story tells exactly why people in developing countries could save a lot of time, pain and money if they spent a little time and money on visiting cities in what we call the developed world and horror-shock, even hire a consultant from the west and jump thirty or forty years of learning by trial and error.

In this context I hear that Jakarta has cracked down on illegal parkers and has issued over 100,000 parking tickets this year. That’ll show the blighters. But hang on a minute: the city estimates that there are about 500,000 illegal parkers a day. Say five working days a week, 52 weeks a year, I make that about 130 million offences. So chances of getting a ticket: 0.08 percent, if I have counted the noughts right. We think that here in the “developed” world we get about ten percent of the blighters and we still have problems. Not going to happen is it?

 

Peter Guest