The city of Kunming in China (the home town of our analyst Sunny Huang) held its first ever ‘no car day’ recently, with private cars not allowed in the city centre.

The event was the climax of Kunming's 'Urban Public Transport Week', promoting the city's bus system and other alternatives to driving private automobiles around town.

According to GoKunming.com, only buses, taxis and bicycles were allowed on the road, with private cars attempting to enter the city centre stopped and fined by police.

The Kunming government estimated that the 12-hour ban affected 200,000 private automobiles, or one-fourth of the city's total number of registered cars.

During our recent visit to the South American capital, we were able to witness the operation of a payment by e-tag in a large shopping centre car park. The system has been recently installed and the owner is expecting that use will increase very fast from a currently low 2% to around 40% of transactions.

The agreement with the state controlled provider of the tags for payment on the country’s highways took a long time to complete; now, tag users can enter and exit the car park without the need to take a ticket or attend a paystation at the end of their stay. A set of cameras located at each entry point reads the customer’s number plate and if it recognises it as an approved tag holder, the boomgates rise (otherwise a ticket is issued). On exit, the cameras once again read the number plate and the system debits the cost of the parking to the customer’s tag account. Easy!

Below are a few photos. During the initial month of use, customers who signed up were offered discounted parking (50%) but the owner is not anticipating any special discounts going forward.

The NSW Premier Barry O’Farrell announced last month plans to refurbish the convention, exhibition and entertainment precinct in Darling Harbour.

The upgrade will see the area boast Australia’s largest convention and exhibition facilities, Sydney’s largest red carpet entertainment venue and a hotel complex of up to 900 rooms. A new urban neighbourhood in Haymarket will be part of one of the most exciting urban renewal projects the city has ever seen, according to a press release from NSW Government.

The preferred bidder is a consortium called Destination Sydney, comprising AEG Ogden, Lend Lease, Capella Capital and Spotless. The facilities and the upgrade of the public domain at Darling Harbour will cost about $1 billion.

The existing car parks on the western side of Darling Harbour will be demolished to make way for the urban neighbourhood, home to high-tech businesses, apartments, student accommodation, shops, cafes and restaurants.

A video fly-over of the new development is available below, and for more information you can read the NSW Premier’s press release here, or the Business Events Sydney website here. 

The New York City Transportation Department announced last week the replacement of more than 6,000 parking signs with an easier-to-follow design.

According to the NYTimes, key changes include “more breathing room” (white space), eliminating a colour (blue), and reducing the number of characters needed to explain the rules to a Twitter-friendly 140 (from 250).

The new format displays more prominently the length of time for which parking is allowed, setting the information off in large type inside a box in the upper left corner. The previous opening line on the sign - “No Standing” - has been moved to the middle of the new layout. Beyond the added white space, the department said the new signs, created in a partnership with Pentagram Design, were more readable because they included mixed cases and skinnier arrows, making them easier for the eye to scan.

Car sharing service Zipcar agreed last week to a sale to Avis Budget Group for about $500 million. The deal puts Avis ahead of its competition in the hourly rental market.

According to the Boston Globe, the market for hourly rental in the US has grown to nearly $400 million and could reach $10 billion in North America, Europe and Asia.

Avis says that the two businesses are complementary, and will be able to deliver synergies across the two operations. Zipcar’s fleet utilisation is low during weekdays but spikes during weekends. Avis, meanwhile, has utilization that peaks during the midweek commercial-travel period and has excess capacity on the weekends. The deal would allow Avis to reduce the number of cars at Zipcar locations during the week, but also to use Avis's excess weekend inventory to meet Zipcar's strong weekend demand.

In Australia, Avis’s biggest competitor, Hertz, announced in November that they were launching their own car sharing service, Hertz on Demand. There still seem to be no plans to bring Zipcar to Australia, but Avis’ substantial presence in the marketplace here could see the service introduced off the back of the acquisition.

“The Means” is a report published for a group of London councils, examining the relationship and relevance of parking in ‘successful’ urban centres. The study involved looking at the evidence from reports prepared by foundations, industry associations and public agencies, such as Transport for London. A questionnaire was sent out to all London boroughs, requesting data on parking supply, charging and town centre economic indicators, such as footfall (number of visitors), empty retail units, business turnover and the rate of change in businesses in two town centre areas. Data from market research carried out with shoppers at 3 outer London based shopping centres was also analysed.

Key findings of the report include:

• More parking does not necessarily mean greater commercial success. A well managed parking scheme, where spaces ‘turn over’ frequently can help to increase the number of visitors coming to a town centre and thereby help business.
• There is no such thing as ‘free’ parking. The costs of developing and maintaining parking spaces and then enforcing proper use to ensure good traffic flow have to be borne by somebody. In the case of local authority operated parking (on street or off street) any costs that are not covered by parking revenue falls to local Council Tax payers.
• Shopkeepers consistently overestimate the share of their customers arriving by car. In some cases, this is by a factor of as much as 400%. In London, as well as other cities, the share of those accessing urban centres on foot or by public transport is much greater. Walking is the most important mode for accessing local town centres; public transport is the most important mode for travel to international centres, such as Oxford Street.
• Whilst car drivers spend more on a single trip, walkers and bus users spend more over a week or a month. In 2011, pedestrians in London town centres spent £147 more per month than those travelling by car. Compared with 2004, spending by public transport users and pedestrians has risen; spending by car users and cyclists has decreased.
• A good mix of shops and services and a quality environment are some of the most important factors in attracting visitors to town centres. If both these are poor, then changes to parking or accessibility are very unlikely to make a town centre more attractive.
• Boroughs collect a lot of data on parking but there is less information available on town centre economic factors. Finding ways to coordinate data collection across departments could be helpful to monitor the impacts of parking policies.
• There is very little evidence of the impacts of parking on the night time economy. This is an area that needs more research.

Given the number of local councils, lobby groups, and attention the ‘high street’ urban areas get, and the debate about free parking vs effects on the local businesses, this really solid research explores this relationship closely.

You can download the PDF of the full report from here, or read more online here. 

There is also a detailed appendix with data and graphical charts, providing further statistics from the research, which you can download from here. 

The South Australian State Government has proposed a car park levy for the Adelaide City Council region, at a rate of $750 per space.

According to AdelaideNow.com.au, the council has defended the decision, pointing out that Adelaide will still have cheaper parking fees and the highest number of available parking spaces than any other Australian capital.

This appears to correlate with research by commercial property agency Colliers International, who reported earlier this year that there were more city-centre car parks per city-centre worker in Adelaide than any other Australian capital city.

The levy would be applied to both off-street and on-street ticketed parking spaces from July 2014.

This move by the South Australian government leaves Brisbane as the only capital city without a parking levy. Watch this space!

A nice story from Denver in the lead up to the holiday season, where the Denver Public Works decided to hand out 250 vouchers for $5 worth of parking.

In a nice twist, the parking officers, whose job is usually to dispense the fines, were tasked with handing out the vouchers. 

Melbourne Airport is clearly in the midst of a kangaroo population explosion. Following the news of one getaway kangaroo in the Melbourne Airport car park in late October, another kangaroo was chased through the car park by police this week.

As police hopped the rescue, the kangaroo skipped away, eventually being sedated with a tranquiliser gun. Watch the car (park) chase footage here.