From The Dish:
Humans burn about one million barrels of oil a day searching for parking spaces, according to Greg Rucks and Laura Guevara-Stone. They propose a new approach:
Smart parking pilot programs are now being deployed in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Stockholm, Beijing, Shanghai, São Paulo, and the Netherlands. For example, in Los Angeles, low-power sensors and smart meters track the occupancy of parking spaces throughout the Hollywood district, one of its most congested areas. Users can access that occupancy data to determine the availability of spots and then pay for them with their mobile phones. In addition to lending convenience and environmental benefits, smart parking improves the utilization of existing parking, leading to greater revenue for parking owners. Los Angeles saw a return on its investment in smart parking within three months.
Why the time is right:
The costs of sensors and hardware-based solutions is decreasing drastically, for the first time allowing cities and companies to gather detailed new data on transportation patterns. Furthermore, with smart phones capturing more and more of the global telecommunications market in both developing and developed nations, software entrepreneurs are able to collect and analyze data and deliver insights and information to consumers in brand new ways that do not require installation of new hardware.
For example, Roadify started in 2009 as a free app that helped New York City residents find parking spaces. Users enter the address of a spot that they are about to leave or of an open spot that they happen to walk by, earning points known as Street Carma (users can later cash in that Carma to redeem rewards). Other users nearby will see that spot on the app if they search the area. The app has since expanded to cities nationwide and now provides real-time transit information about schedules, delays, accidents, and more from crowd-sourced commentary about local transit conditions.
Previous Dish on the future of parking here, here, and here.
Car use has two states: driving and parking. Both are too cheap in Vancouver. For public transit to function well, car use has to be made more expensive and inconvenient in Vancouver.
Such apps sure help to ease the flow.
Parking could be metered by foot, not by current space. A huge pick-up truck takes far more space than a Smart Car that I rent from time-to-time. So why do they both pay the same ?
The transit debate cannot be just about “more funding”. It also has to be about less car use, and less care use will happen only if it is far more expensive, both driving and parking.
One key feature in condo buildngs is parking. In Toronto it is now common to sell the stall(s) separately, which is not allowed (yet) in Vancouver. Why not ? An underground parkade is very expensive to build, about $40,000 a stall, and as such will increase condo prices and reduce affordability.
Again current policies, even when it comes to parking, continues to subsidize those who choose to make inefficient and uneconomic choices when it comes to driving. Not just when they choose to drive, but also what they vehicles they choose to drive. Until this ends, we’re going to go around and around on this issue.
One of the big mistakes (in my personal view) that the City of Vancouver has made has been to not aggressively control parking, particularly Central Business District parking and that has kept it from fully exploiting the Skytrain system. Calgary, as an example, has enacted strict controls on parking, allowing new downtown commercial developments to only build a fraction of the parking that might be required if all users were driving to the building in question. The result has contributed to a genuine mode-shift away from the personal automobile for downtown workers and probably the most successful light rail transit system in North America, at least amongst the post-79 new builds. It’s also why costs for downtown parking in Calgary are second only to New York, but that’s a necessary component of creating the economic impetuous to move away from car use.
I wrote a column on this topic in BIV which may be of interest to some: http://www.biv.com/article/20131112/BIV0319/311129866/0/SEARCH/Don%27t-park-plans-for-pricing-parking-amid-transit-funding-debate
I still think one of the more ingenious levies ever was in Sweden, where (I think it was in Trelleborg), if you wanted to drive downtown during peak periods, you had to display a valid transit pass. In this way the money went directly into transit revenue. Transponders would do the job today. If you’ve ever counted the percentage of single occupant vehicles on the Burrard or Lions Gate bridge during rush hour …
If daily oil consumption is around 90 million barrels a day, this translates to using 1.1% of daily supply searching for parking. I’m all for smart parking because parking has such negative impacts on the urban environment, but it won’t decrease energy use all that much.