Last week, Brisbane’s Westfield Chermside shopping centre activated its paid parking scheme, which provides three hours of free parking, $2 for parking between 3 and 3.5 hours; $3 for 4 hours, $6 for 5 hours, and a flat rate of $20 for 7 hours or more.

Westfield first announced the paid parking measures in late June, citing research that about 25% of parking spaces were being taken up by non-shoppers, and that 93% of its customers stay for less than three hours, with the nearby Chermside bus interchange catering for 5,000 commuters every day.

The introduction of paid parking appears to have resulted in local residential streets around the shopping centre being clogged with cars particularly within walking distance of the Chermside-CBD bus stops, with some vehicles even blocking driveways.

According to The Courier Mail, Lord Mayor Graham Quirk is placing responsibility on the State Government for not providing a park and ride facility, leading Westfield to attribute the need for paid parking on commuters parking out these shopping centres.

A Westfield spokeswoman was quoted in The Courier Mail, saying that the system ran smoothly yesterday, with happy shoppers easily finding parks. "We have received positive feedback from customers on the ease of finding convenient car spaces and the centre has strong visitation numbers," she said.

Whilst bike-sharing schemes are relatively commonplace in Europe, in Tokyo they are still a rarity, despite the fact that the Japanese are bike-crazy. The launch of a new bicycle-sharing service aims to change that, adding another layer of technological innovation to the existing model.

The program, called Cosoado Cycles, not only places ‘cycle ports’ in municipalities around Tokyo and nearby Yokohama, but also integrates a strong smartphone element. Potential riders can log on to an Android mobile phone application to locate a port with a free cycle. The cycles are fitted with a near-field communication chip that allows users to pay as well as check the bike out.

Great use of technology to make the scheme more accessible and user friendly, and will hopefully go some way to end the challenge of finding a bike in the packed Tokyo bike parks. Read more on the CNNGo site here.

An article published last week on The Conversation drew comparisons between cycling in China and Australia, ultimately with the aim of applying  learnings from the high bicycle usage in China to the growing but still infant usage in our country.

The author, Matthew Burke, a research fellow at Griffith University, believes firstly that infrastructure is critical to uptake, with every arterial road built in Shanghai including a bicycle lane, usually barricaded from cars. He claims that this makes a safe continuous network of routes right across the urban area.

There are also other supporting reasons: from lower driving speeds in China being more conducive to bicycle riding, to Australian bicycle shops being too daunting for the ‘everyday’ rider, to the availability of the right types of bicycles, to regulation governing the use of electric bicycles.

We agree that all of these elements may be contributing factors to the slower uptake in Australia, but fundamentally we feel that the biggest reason for the high bicycle usage in China is due to the cost of car ownership in that country. Historically, the prospect of owning a car has been an inaccessible dream for many generations, and it is only now, as China rapidly emerges as an economic powerhouse that cars are becoming affordable for the masses. We recently posted research by IBIS World that showed that whilst bicycle usage is on the increase in Australia, it’s actually declining in China due to their rapid urbanisation, trading in two wheels for four.

Whilst the supporting infrastructure in China is great, this would have been driven more by the burgeoning demand than the supply of dedicated bicycle lanes. However, there are many learnings that Australia can take from bicycle usage in China to help increase our own cycling take up.

Yesterday, October 12, Australia held an annual ‘Ride to Work Day’. The initiative, organised by Bicycle Network Victoria, saw a big turnout across the country, with Fairfax media reporting an estimated 150,000 participants nationally (of which 40,000 in Victoria).

An estimated 3.6 million Australians already ride their bikes at least once a week, with 1.1 million of those in Victoria, making it the country's biggest state in terms of hitting the pedals.

The Sydney Morning Herald reported on October 1 that while Victoria is embracing riding, NSW lags behind as the state with the lowest rate of cycling. The Australian Bicycle Council survey found in a typical week around 18 per cent of Australians ride a bike, with about 3.6 million riding for leisure or sport while 1.2 million people make at least one transport journey.

The rapidly growing use of bicycles on the streets of our cities, due in part to increased infrastructure, is not all smooth sailing, however. The timelapse video below was captured at Australia’s busiest bicycle intersection, on the corner of Melbourne’s Flinders and Swanson Streets, and highlights just how many road rules are regularly broken by cars and bicycles alike.

A guest post by Andrew Morse, our senior traffic engineer.

A question was posted on a Linkedin group recently asking “does the ‘Keep Right Unless Overtaking’ rule still apply in the US?”.  This got me thinking about the situation in Australia, where like other countries that drive on the sensible side of the road, the rule applies to the left lanes.

According to Australia Road Rule 130, drivers are required to keep to the left of a multi-lane road where vehicle speeds are 80kph or over and where ‘Keep Left Unless Overtaking’ signs apply to a length of road. Seems straight forward enough and those who have read the signs will notice that there is a fine applicable for drivers caught breaking this rule.

This is all fine, until you observe the motorways in New South Wales and realise that not only is the rule not enforced, it seems that most of us are totally unaware of its existence.  Not wishing to lump the blame entirely on us drivers, it is apparent that there are other factors at play which influence driver behaviour on our motorways.  For example, the motorways in and around Sydney, which aren’t really motorways, but a connected network of dual carriageways, are constrained by the urban surroundings leading to quite narrow lanes widths and some fairly tight geometry.  There are multiple entries and exits on both sides of each carriageway, interchanges which only allow certain movements and very few opportunities for a U-turn movement back on to the system.  Add to this that many of the lanes become directional lanes (eg the Gore Hill system approaching the Harbour Bridge and Tunnel) and applying a ‘Keep Left’ rule becomes almost impossible.

I don’t have any data to indicate whether a motorway is safer or more efficient if the rule is or isn’t applied.  However, what a road authority must ensure is that it adopts one or the other rather than the situation in NSW where the road rule exists, the signs are in place, but nobody takes any notice.  What this leads to is a set of drivers who are unaware or ambivalent about the rule and those who are aware of the rule being frustrated by the blocking of all lanes by drivers not overtaking. 

As a professional Traffic Engineer, I do not in any way condone speeding on any part of the road network; however it is not up to a driver to enforce the speed limit on others.  If there is no obstruction in the left lane, why not use it?  An example of this is the Eastern Distributor entry ramp from General Holmes Drive (if travelling from the airport to the city), I would estimate that 90% of vehicles joining the motorway move immediately to the centre and right lanes leaving the left lane empty.  You don’t have to be a traffic engineer to work out that if only two lanes of three are used, this is not an efficient use of our roads.

It is apparent that when it comes to motorway driving, driver training is extremely important.  What we need to understand is that driving over 80kph changes our perception of distance and speed and I’m sure we’ve all seen videos demonstrating how slow the human reactions really are at 110kph.  I would like to see a campaign in NSW to increase driver skills on motorways and to apply a different attitude towards motorway driving in comparison with the rest of the road network.  A review of motorway speed limits is required to provide more consistency (the speed limit on Epping Road, an arterial road, is 10kph higher than the adjacent M2 Motorway) and the Government is presently undertaking a review of a number of routes.  All that’s needed is a bit more common sense.

A guest post by Andrew Morse, our senior traffic engineering consultant

There, I’ve said it and I feel much better.  Well not really because every day I am astounded by the number of drivers who think it’s perfectly acceptable to enter an intersection (typically on amber) knowing full well that they can’t clear the intersection and are going to block the intersecting traffic.  And what do they gain? Ending up in front of a few cars making the left turn from the side road! Well, they would be turning if you hadn’t stopped in their way!

It’s easy to be flippant about queuing through intersections and treat it as nothing more than silly drivers getting annoyed with each other, but there is a more serious side to this issue, which I am convinced, is getting worse by the day.   In Sydney and most major cities, traffic signals are controlled and monitored by a central computer system, which collects real-time data from the road network and (in theory) adjusts the traffic signals to suit the conditions.  As you can imagine, these systems cost a healthy lump cash to install, maintain and monitor.  SCOOT is a signal coordination system based in the UK and according to the SCOOT website, the system offers reductions in delays of around 12%.  So a lot of time, money, energy and infrastructure are invested in gaining a 12% reduction in traffic delay. 

Consider then, the impact of one vehicle blocking the movements of an intersecting road for anything up to the entire green phase.  Under a coordinated system, the length of each signal phase attempts to clear the vehicle queue within a single phase.  Not always possible of course, but a worthy challenge.  Therefore, even a slight reduction in the number of vehicles able to pass through the intersection during a green phase has a dramatic knock-on effect on the length of the queue, and the longer the queue the more green time required to clear it.  In tight inner city road networks, the queue is more likely to affect upstream intersections, which in turn increases the risk of another driver stopping in that intersection and so the ripples spread.  Suddenly all that investment (read tax payers dollars) to achieve a 12% gain in capacity is lost because of a very small proportion of road users.

Another way to look at this is to invest a fraction of the cost of a coordinated signal system on educating drivers of the impact they have and to actually enforce the Road Rule which is in place to discourage this activity.  There are physical measures available too, including the painted yellow box system. 

Comments encouraged!

A guest post by Glenn Caldwell, our local council specialist consultant 

A recent article published on Parking World's site reports on the latest changes being made to Los Angeles older style parking meters.

Amir Sedadi of the Los Angeles Office of Parking Management, Planning & Regulations expressed interest in the future of on-street parking technology, yet realises that something needed to be done immediately to update the older single space parking meters.

“We found ourselves in an interesting position a few years ago” Amir said. “We knew we needed to update our method of on-street revenue collection. We had done studies with pay-by-space, pay-and-display and single-space meters. The main criteria had to be that they would accept credit cards and would work reliably.”

Parking fees in Los Angeles are on the increase – beyond the capacity for the older single head meters to handle. Although Los Angeles was considering a public-private-partnership option (PPP) to expedite the upgrade process, they decided to enter a 3 year lease-to-own program that allowed their single head parking meters to be upgraded with the latest credit card technology. The parking meter posts were retained in the process. 

“Meter revenue is up by an average of 50% where the new meters were installed, and that’s without changing any rates or hours,” said Dan Mitchell, Senior Transportation Engineer. “Meters are up and running more than 99% of the time......... enforceable citations at the new meters were up 15%,” Mitchell said

The City is currently in a test program with Streetline Inc. to install individual space-monitoring devices on-street. Focused primarily on the Hollywood area, the 1,000-space pilot program will transmit information back to the LA management centre to be used to direct enforcement. “By sending enforcement staff to areas where multiple violations were reported, the department was able to increase effectiveness by 250%,” Sedadi said. “A special iPhone app identifies potential violations and tracks enforcement of those spaces in real-time.”

In the near future LA will introduce ExpressPark as a means of integrating on-street vehicle sensors, off-street occupancy systems and parking guidance. By adopting a Don Shoup theory of demand based pricing, ExpressPark will be able to set prices to ensure parking availability of between 10% to 30%. By adjusting pricing in certain areas, and providing real-time parking availability information, drivers will be able to make quick decisions as to where they can park and at what cost.

In our opinion, cashless payments are gaining significant popularity for smaller ad hoc purchases (such as on-street parking fees) and Parking Authorities ignoring this trend will likely incur significant loss in revenue. Compounded by rising parking costs, motorists are finding it harder to scrape together coins to feed the meters leading to forced non-compliance. There are several other benefits of introducing credit card technology – reduced cash handling costs, better meter performance, and reduced exposure to fraud.

Parking sensors are also gaining in popularity – most likely due to their adaptability to a wider range of parking management models. Parking sensors can be used as a stand alone solution to gauge vehicle compliance and turnover without the assistance of meters. However even in a Pay-and-display environment, sensors can assist with the management of vehicle turnover – eliminating the risk of motorists overstaying the allowable time restrictions by purchasing additional ticket parking. Introducing parking sensors ultimately provides the parking authority with real time information and negates the need for regular and costly parking surveys. Accuracy and reliability of such a system is important as it can dramatically reduce the number of motorists contesting parking infringements (another significant social and financial burden for Councils).

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.

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. 

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.