According to the Wilts and Gloucestershire Standard, the Cotswold District Council (UK) recently voted to extend weekday parking charges to Sundays and apply a flat rate £1.50 fee for overnight parking between 6pm and 8am, in a bid to raise £55,000 extra revenue.

In the newspaper article it is claimed that a UK parking consultant has deemed the move as unlawful, based on a ruling by the High Court against Camden Borough Council in 1995 which states that councils cannot introduce new charges merely to generate revenue.

We would expect that Councils may wish to extend paid parking to cover the entire week once the system is functioning well in the area and it would be hard to explain the reason in any other terms than the raising of additional revenues, unless specific customer driven outcomes can also be identified and highlighted. We all know as well that providing such an explanation would result in a negative reaction from the community, wherever that happens.

We have posted in the past a number of articles about car sharing, with companies such as GoGet operating in Australia and Zipcar in the US. Robin Chase, the founder Zipcar, talked at TED in 2007 about a range of other technology-enabled ways of reducing car usage, the first being technology to enable ‘ridesharing’ – car pooling for the modern age.

A number of smartphone applications have recently been introduced, as reported by SmartCompany. We are really supportive of the different ways that each of these companies have approached the same problem; there could be many applications and learnings for our industry. These apps include:

Zimride is based on a simple premise: drivers post where they're going, how many seats they have available and how much they want to charge per seat. Potential passengers can submit their payment info, and drivers have the leeway to decide whether to accept or decline an offer (both passengers and drivers have profile info and reviews). Passengers get a full refund if the driver doesn't show up.

Reward Ride will use a points-based system to connect riders and drivers with riders paying by their purchased ‘points’. When a ride is completed, drivers receive points from their passengers that they can then use for other rides.

Zebigo features a system that matches riders and drivers taking into account profile and route, and riders pay a distance-based fee to drivers. There’s also the added benefit of an optional background check on your potential car buddy.

Avego offers a real-time ridesharing service that matches drivers with riders who have a similar destination. Avego pays drivers for gas, and passengers pay Avego a small fee. Both passengers and drivers can also rate each other for future reference. Of these apps, only Avego is available outside the US at this stage.

Ridesharing is the next logical step from car sharing; not only increasing utilisation, but also reducing the number of cars on the road.

Is the next step after that to reduce cars on the roads? According to Robin Chase, its technology-enabled wireless road pricing, taking congestion charges to the next level in charging car owners based on how much they use the roads.

You can watch Robin’s talk in full on TED’s website below.

UK telco T-mobile has capitalised on the emotional distress that a parking ticket can cause to drivers – especially when they don’t think that they deserve it. They’ve come up with a great idea that plays on this and catches more than a few people out! Enjoy. 

Fairfax reported this week that the value of individual car park bays in the Melbourne CBD are now selling up to $100,000, due to population growth and Melbourne City Council’s discouragement of long-term commercial parking.

According to data from Savills Australia, state-titled single car parking bays, such as the Paramount complex in Bourke Street, are trading for at least $60,000 each.

The removal of many on-street parking spaces, through reallocation to loading or disabled zones, coupled with a significant rise in demand over parking supply, have seen the value of car parks increase dramatically.

According to Savills, Melbourne City Council's strategy to discourage car parking and promote public transport, cycling and walking was great news for existing owners of car parks, with an ongoing escalation of car parking rates and capital values can be expected.

Savills will be selling two CBD car parks this year - a GPT-owned car park opposite Melbourne Central comprising 689 bays over 10 levels, and a 574-bay car park at 300 Flinders Street owned by Victoria University. The Melbourne Central site is expected to fetch more than $25 million and the 300 Flinders Street property will be put to the market in coming weeks. 

Following our post two weeks ago interviewing parking professional Barbara Chance on automated car parks, this week Parking Today magazine have published a summation of an interview with two parking professionals from the University of Texas, Austin, exploring the issues facing university campus parking. 

The two interviewees are Bob Harkins, Associate VP for Campus Safety and Security; and Bobby Stone, Director of Parking and Transportation Services at the University of Texas at Austin.

There are some great learnings and advice that Parking Today have compiled in summarising the article; including tips on signage and communications, understanding customers, campus transportation and sustainability. With university parking a key sub-segment of our industry, we would recommend all of those with an interest or who advise within a similar environment to have a read of the post on the Parking Today site here.

The Advertiser reported this week that the chief executive of Adelaide City Council’s Transport Department has called for a reduction in the number of car spaces in the CBD, and an increase in parking pricing.

Rod Hook, Transport Department chief executive, was reported by The Advertiser as saying that Adelaide commuters had become too used to driving their cars into the city because of the cheap and large number of public parking spaces available.

He says that the ease of driving is causing congestion, with more than twice as many car parks in the city than are required, as people choose to drive rather than options including public transport.

The Adelaide CBD has 41,000 public parking spaces, and the cheapest parking of any Australian capital, with the exception of Hobart..By comparison, Sydney has 30,000, Melbourne 35,000, Perth about 10,000 and Brisbane has about 20,000 spaces.

Meanwhile, the SA Greens MP Mark Parnell claimed he first floated the idea of a levy on car parking in the '90s, with the money being used to fund free public transport around the city.

A recent post penned by Kevin Moore, CEO of Crossmark (a sales and marketing services provider to the retail industry) which appeared on the Smart Company website, claims that the parking policies of local councils is stifling retail growth. 

Moore argues that traditional high street retail stores are being squeezed out by local council parking and traffic policies which concentrate only on moving the bus or motorbike or car through as fast as possible, getting cars and people in and out of their suburb or town centre as fast as possible, or of generating parking-sourced income. According to the article, these policies will actively, if unwittingly, destroy jobs in retail and in their communities. Moore goes on to call for innovation and a re-think of local council’s parking policies, with a view to far greater benefits for the high street retailers. You can view his opinion piece on the Smart Company website here.

This is a common complaint from local businesses whenever there is an issue with parking policy. However, the number of kerbside parking spaces often represent a small fraction of the total visitors to the locale, resulting in delays and congestion in vehicle access to the high street areas, where there may only be a couple of spaces available at any one time.

It has often been observed that whenever paid parking is introduced into a business district, the drop in local patronage is relatively small. However, there is no available evidence that such controls have had any long-term impact on a business district OR hindered its affluence.

It has been noted by several council officers that the unavailability of parking can often be caused by staff working in the local businesses. It is common practice for local workers to move cars around during the day to avoid parking fines. This is quite a sensitive issue as it is hard to accuse the retailers of being responsible for often creating the problem in the first place.

The preferred solution is to determine the optimal time restrictions throughout the locality and if required, introduce ticket parking at a low cost or adopt other measures to achieve effective enforcement of overstays. The introduction of paid parking and/or bay sensors would permit effective parking enforcement, further allowing the determination of very exact time restrictions to suit the locale in question. These policies would have little impact on local business with the benefit of preventing long term parkers monopolising the spaces and encouraging turnover.

Thanks to Parking & Traffic Consultants’ newest team member, Glenn Caldwell, for his opinions on this report. Glenn is our local council specialist consultant, and joins Parking & Traffic Consultants from his former role within the City of Sydney.

According to a recently released Productivity Commission draft report, Australia’s five major airports have been found not to be misusing their market power in setting car parking and land access rates. The report, entitled ‘Economic Regulation of Airport Services’, differed from the findings of the report into airport parking prices by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission released in 2010.

The Australian Airports Association welcomed the latest report, saying it confirmed there was little need to monitor the nation's airports more tightly.

Meanwhile in New Zealand, Auckland International Airport Limited has released their performance for the 2011 financial year, posting a solid +15.1% increase in underlying profit to NZ$120.87 million.

The Moodie Report claimed that total income grew +9.5% to NZ$397.72 million (US$328.97 million), with two of the key drivers of this revenue growth were "better than expected" retail results in the new departures area and a stronger yield in car parking, particularly through the new online booking channel.

At 30 June 2011, the airport had parking facilities for 7,988 cars, the same as the prior year. Despite no change in the number of spaces available, car park income increased +7.7% to NZ$33.437 million (US$27.66 million). According to the airport, this growth has been driven by continued promotional activity, a refinement of product offerings, including a valet car cleaning service, a full year of online booking capability and passenger growth. View the full results and report here. 

Following our recent blog post about the launch of ‘Google Wallet’ and the emergence of secure payments by mobile phones using ‘Near Field Communications’ (NFC), one of the UK’s largest transport operators announced this week that it will be fitting contactless card readers to its fleet of approximately 5,000 buses across England in 2012.

FirstGroup aims to make First Bus vehicles the first bus fleet outside London to install contactless readers, enabling customers to use contactless debit or credit cards and ITSO smartcards such as concessionary bus passes. In addition to this, NFC-enabled smart phones will also be accepted – simply by holding the device near the reader for the fare to be paid.

It is probably only a matter of time before this technology starts appearing in parking stations. This would (potentially) result in a reduction to the number of paystations required, as the customer would pass the device near a reader at the entry and again at the exit, with the due amount being charged to the credit card, debit card, or via the mobile phone bill. The processing time at the exit would be significantly reduced allowing for a faster throughput particularly at peak times. 

The amount of cash required to be held at the paystations would also significantly reduce, with consequent cost savings in cash handling. Additionally, a completely cashless car park would enable pricing structures to be easily increased annually by inflation with no need for rounding to the nearest 10c or 50c. Taking this one step further, charging could be applied to say, 10 minute blocks, or even adjusted according to time of day and/or demand. Now that would be radical in the parking world! 

A frustrated construction worker put his skills with a bulldozer to good use by delicately removing a vehicle blocking the entrance to his building site.

According to Metro.co.uk, Ralf Scherrer from St Gallen, Switzerland, used the massive machine to move a classic Fiat X1/9 sports car illegally parked across the entry to the site.

He explained that motorists park their vehicles in difficult spots all the time, but this time it really angered him. Mr Scherrer lifted the offending vehicle with the bulldozer's digger arm and managed to squeeze the car into a tiny parking space away from the building site, without damaging it. Read more on this here.

Thanks to Ismo Husu, the Parking Services Coordinator at City of Victoria, Canada, for his contribution to this week’s blog!