A message from Cristina Lynn, Parking & Traffic Consultants’ Managing Partner.

As you may be aware the biennial convention organised by the Parking Association of Australia will be held on 11 – 13 November 2012 at the Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre.

Similarly to the event held in 2010 the Exhibition will be occupying Hall 6 with over 2,000m² of space (only four booths are left unsold as of the time of writing), whilst the educational sessions will take place in a plenary room which will provide classroom or cabaret style seating thus allowing for much better delegate interaction than we had at the last conference.

We have speakers coming from the US, Canada, Europe, China, New Zealand and Australia who will cover a wide range of relevant topics. Please refer to the program and speaker information on the Convention’s website at parkingconvention.com.au

Registration for delegates is now open and early bird places are available until August 10th. You will see that prices remain the same as those of two years ago. Attached is the Registration Brochure (click here to view this as a PDF) but all the information, including the ability to register on-line is available via the website.

Parking & Traffic Consultants will be exhibiting once again and we look forward to the opportunity of welcoming you to our stand and to the conference in a few months’ time.

Best regards

Cristina Lynn

Managing Partner, Parking & Traffic Consultants

Chair of the Organising Committee for APC2012

It seems that some of the more aspirational car park exterior designs around the world are starting to see recognition in the mainstream commercial design world.

An article recently published in Commercial Design Trends magazine (see their website at trendsideas.com) explores how car park façades are being used to disguise and shelter car park buildings whilst simultaneously enliven the streetscape.

The article focuses on three car parks in particular, citing the new Brisbane domestic terminal car park, whose exterior was designed by Urban Art Projects, as a great example of how a beautiful design can minimise the visual impact of the car park. With 130,000 suspended, perforated aluminium squares that move in the wind, the building appears to ‘ripple’, creating a direct interface between the built and natural environments.

The Auckland City Hospital car park was recognised for its design, with the façade featuring folded metal panels with four million large and small perforations forming a tree pattern, and creating light and shade. The panels were also designed to ventilate the building.

In the US, the City of Santa Monica has set about improving the look of its downtown area, with one of the key targets being the eight parking garages around the popular 3^rd Street Promenade and refurbished Santa Monica Place. Brooks & Scarpa were commissioned to design improvements to the garages, including new façades, improved pedestrian access, enhanced lighting and ground-floor tenancies. Read more about the project on the article online here.

Innovations in the design of car parks – both to their frontages as well as the design of the interior of the structure – have a huge impact on how people interact not only with the car parks, but the public spaces that they are in. For more information, we recommend reading the article in full here. 

There’s been a lot of exposure in the UK on Mary Portas, the spokesperson and champion of reinvigorating local high streets (see our past article here). This week we came across commentary by UK parking consultant Chris Wortley on the likelihood of councils abolishing paid parking on their high streets.

Acknowledging that this is highly unlikely, Wortley suggests that instead, towns and cities could explore a range of alternative measures to make parking more attractive:

• Special parking offers for members of shopping centre VIP clubs
• Off peak and premium pricing to encourage a spread of the hordes
• Pricing based on popularity of arrival and departure - like the airports
• Better car park lighting and security
• Minimum standards - Parkmark car parks can charge more, but it has to be much harder to get Parkmark than it is today
• Automated payment methods that bill you monthly
• Discounts on shopping if you use the centre car park

Wortley concludes with some advice to local retailers and shopkeepers: don’t blame parking charges if your sales are down, but instead at those elements within their control: availability, findability, store navigation, choice & selection, ambiance, variety, and the right number of staff to make the shopping experience great. Not bad advice, we think. With regards to the parking advice given by Wortley above, they require a high level of technological support which most councils currently do not have (at least in Australia); we look forward to the time when retailers can work collaboratively with councils to achieve common goals rather than taking the usual antagonistic positions we see over and over again.

The UK’s Telegraph published a great gallery of their top 10 most bike-friendly universities. We thought we would conclude this week’s blog posts with a selection of three of our favourites (of the top ten) below.

At No. 10: Oxford University (image in heading above) offers 2,900 bike spaces dotted around what is the UK's oldest university.

At No. 8: University of York has 3,081 spaces for its 10,000 students. The university has a 'Bike Doctor' to ensure students' bikes receive routine maintenance checks free of charge and free bike hire for up to 48 hours when travelling between King's Manor and the Heslington Campus.

At No. 1: Biking is big business in Cambridge and for the 12,000 or so students there are 6,200 bike spaces dotted around what is the UK's second oldest university. Bike theft is Cambridge's biggest crime with nearly 3,000 stolen from the city centre last year. Buying a decent lock, however, shouldn't be a problem with more than 20 bike shops in the town to choose from.

For more bike friendly universities, view the article in full on the Telegraph’s site here.

The 2012 Emerging Trends in Parking Survey from the International Parking Institute (IPI) has seen increased demand for technology-related innovations account for half of the top ten trends in today's $30 billion parking industry. Among these trends include, cashless, electronic, and automatic payment systems; real-time information about parking rates and availability via mobile apps; and wireless sensing devices for improved traffic management.

According to a press release from the IPI, the survey results reflect the demand for technology, sustainability, revenue-generation, and customer service that are converging, as planners come to the realisation that parking matters to the design of more walkable, livable communities and to broader transportation issues. 

More than one-third of respondents surveyed see the demand for green or sustainable solutions as a top trend affecting the parking profession. It is estimated that about 30 percent of the cars circling a city at any given time are doing so as drivers look for parking. This traffic congestion is viewed by survey respondents as being the single most significant societal change affecting the parking industry, and translating to incalculable amounts of wasted fuel and carbon emissions from an environmental viewpoint.

In terms of technology, the number one strategy for making parking more sustainable is energy-efficient lighting, followed by parking space guidance systems that aid in finding parking faster, encouraging alternative travel, automated payment processes, solar panels, renewable energy technology, and accommodating electric vehicles.

A chief problem identified by respondents is one which those in the parking profession are working hard to correct: decision makers need to consult parking experts earlier in the planning process to prevent a myriad of expensive retrofits and ongoing customer service issues.

The 2012 Emerging Trends in Parking Survey was conducted in May 2012 among parking professionals by the IPI. The full report can be viewed here.

For more industry information, we would recommend our previous Wayfinding Forum post on the White Paper on Australia’s CBD parking which you can view here, and the report in full as a PDF here. 

The most popular article on the Wayfinding Forum we've published (in terms of traffic to the article) was regarding the costs of building a car park (view the article, 'How much does it cost to build a car park', here). This week, we came across data on the construction and design of car parks, with links to some great resources from the US.

Below, we’ve provided links to three of the most relevant and data-rich sources we found.

Transportation Cost and Benefit Analysis, Parking Costs.

By the Victorian Transport Policy Institute, this chapter of a larger report explores the costs of providing parking. It investigates the costs of different types of parking facilities, the number of spaces per vehicle, and the distribution of parking costs. It also includes cost estimates for parking in the US. View on the VTP site here. 

Parking Facilities, by WBDG.

This is a guide to the building and design of car parks, providing a comprehensive list of considerations, trends and emerging issues. View at the WBDG.org site.  

Estimate of the number of car parks in the US.

From the Scientific American, this collection of links and resources focuses mainly on the volume of cars and vehicles in the US. 

If any of our Wayfinding Forum readers have any other links, resources or data that is publically available and would like to share them with us, please do so! You can email us or post a comment with any data in the comments section below. We’ll publish any great resources to our site next week.

Thanks to the Hybrid Garages site for this collection of links.

(Yes, you may have heard about this already…!)

The mayor of the German town of Triberg has courted controversy by introducing parking spaces for women only, which are wider and have better lighting.

Explaining the policy, Mayor Gallus Strobel said it was a “natural” decision because men are better at parking than women. He then added that there were great women drivers, and all women were welcome to park in the men-only spaces as well. He further pointed out that 10 spaces were reserved for women as opposed to just two for men.

According to the UK Telegraph, the two men-only designated spaces that are causing all the fuss are considered ‘difficult’ because they are not rectangular, at an angle to the road, and placed between walls and pillars.

Meanwhile on the Sydney Morning Herald, it would seem that Triberg is not the first place to introduce women’s parking zones. A car park in the Chinese city of Tianjin (China) recently introduced a women-only parking zone, marked with a pink paint scheme which includes wider spots, brighter lighting and additional guide rails.

Recent research has thrown up different results on the question of which is the fairer sex behind the wheel.

In January, a UK study found that women were better parkers because they were more careful and took more time to park accurately.

But a more recent study by the UK's Department for Transportation's Driving Standards Agency found that females are more likely to fail a driving test than males because they tend to have issues reverse parking.

The second annual Airport Operations Conference will be held in Canberra in September this year. 

The conference is the only event addressing operational challenges and opportunities in airport development, and will take a close look at current trends, as well as offering a site tour of Canberra Airport.

The key issues to be covered at Airport Operations 2012 include:

• The global and domestic aviation industry: What are our biggest challenges?
• Outlining trends in inbound and outbound travel
• Arguing the case for a second Sydney airport
• Accommodating growth in the Fly-In Fly-Out sector
• Strategies for growth in non-aero revenue
• Enhancing the customer experience through seamless technology integration
• Designing airports that are adaptable to change and growth
• Issues with land transport access to our major airports
• Bridging the gap between airports and their urban surrounds
• Developing commercial landside revenue strategies

We are very pleased to have our Managing Partner, Cristina Lynn, deliver a presentation on Developing Commercial Landside Revenue Strategies at airports.

You can view the full program for Airport Operations 2012 as a PDF here.

Thanks to Cristina’s involvement, readers of the Wayfinding Forum are entitled to a 10% discount to attend the conference. To find out more, or to book tickets, visit the discount registration page here.

In an article published on the Australian Financial Review recently, transport consultant John Cox claims that the potential introduction of road pricing is much needed with discussions going on under the surface.

One of the biggest driving factors in the examination of road pricing has been the realisation that the congestion issue in Australian cities will actually be greater than previous projections due to greater population forecasts. For example, the projections in the 2007 congestion estimates of the Bureau of Transport and Regional Economics now seem significantly too low (Melbourne was assumed to have a population of 4.1 million by 2020, where the population has already reached 4 million and is estimated to reach 4.7 million in 2020).

Another is that the hopes of economically efficient road pricing having a significant effect on reducing congestion have been reduced, with the perceived proposed pricing reduction of 9¢/km now thought to be too low to have any affect (with the perceived cost of private travel in Sydney and Melbourne at around 53¢/km). Finally, there now seems to be less reluctance by politicians to consider increased in road user charges.

According to Cox, most of the increased road traffic in Australian cities is being taken on the freeway network, and there is a realization that the only way to effectively reduce congestion is with increased road capacity that transfers traffic from costly urban arterial roads to high-capacity freeways.

Although road pricing is not useful for reducing congestion, it would raise significant annual funding for capital road investments to increase road capacity and thus reduce congestion. A 4¢/km increase in road user charges would equate to an increase in the de facto fuel charge of 32¢/litre, which would raise an additional $1.7 billion each year for road investments.

Cox claims that a Council of Australian Governments road reform study has developed a plan for efficient pricing and infrastructure funding for heavy vehicles, showing what a long-term project the introduction of road pricing would be – with a seven year timetable to introduce such prices.

With Brisbane’s CBD parking prices rapidly catching up to those in Sydney and Melboune, The Brisbane Times claims that a large number of inner city residents are leasing their garages and driveways to motorists, keen to avoid the off-street parking fees and on-street parking meters.

Figures supplied from RentMyCarPark.com.au show that the average weekly rent for these off market spaces is $79, equating to just over $4,000 per year in extra income for owners, and cheaper than the cheapest early bird rates at the off-street private car parks.

A Council spokesman has condemned the practice as illegal, with the private parking provider essentially operating a car parking business without city planning approval.

The increase in demand for off-street parking has meant a significant increase in the number of people using the service across Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane inner-city areas.