The Parking Scout

03/04/2018

The NSW Government recently announced the Opal Park & Ride trial at the Ashfield commuter car park. In the same way as the trial occurring in Dee Why, the scheme is designed to offer free parking for users who combine private vehicle and public transport use in their commute.

How that works is that commuters tap their public transport smart card (Opal) at the entrance to the car park and tap their card again to catch public transport. If they return to the car park in 18 hours or less, they can benefit from free parking by tapping their Opal card at the car park exit. Other conditions apply to ensure that only commuters are getting free parking, such as having completed a public transport trip and not tapping off at the same location within 30 minutes.

Drivers who are using the car park to visit nearby destinations and, therefore, not catching public transport to complete their journey, will have to pay the full parking fee. With this system, commuter car parks can genuinely serve their purpose and encourage public transport use for those travelling to destinations outside the suburb.

Every effort to remove cars from the streets and to encourage the use of public transport to more congested areas (i.e. Sydney CBD) is welcomed. However, unless other car park users are expected to subsidise the car park costs (land, construction and ongoing operational and maintenance costs, for example), parking shouldn’t be entirely free for commuters.

In our experience, introducing paid parking in a car park is much more challenging than increasing an existing fee or offering a discount in the future if market conditions change. In our opinion, it is possible to charge commuters an attractive parking rate, encouraging public transport use.

For instance, if someone working in the southern end of the Sydney CBD is considering driving to work every day, he or she would have to account a parking cost of around $20 per day. The return train fare from Ashfield to Town Hall during peak hours is $8.60, therefore the commuter car park fee would have to be set at (say) $6 – $8 to represent a good deal and compensate for the change in transport mode.

As Donald Shoup says, there isn’t such a thing as free parking. If someone has to bear the cost, it should be those who use the car parks, commuters or not.

What is your opinion, should commuters pay for parking?

11/07/2017

http://www.reinventingparking.org/2017/06/on-street-parking-fees-despite-zero.html?m=1

11/07/2017

http://www.reinventingparking.org/2017/06/on-street-parking-fees-despite-zero.html?m=1

Can on-street parking fees really help places with poor public transport? I was asked this many times in Pune, India,  while I was there ...

23/06/2017

19/03/2017

Parking Today

30/11/2016

28/11/2016

Puzzle Parking System
Installation in progress
Ghatkopar East

04/10/2016

Dupline Parking Guidance System

29/09/2016

Infosys Chandigarh Installs
Smart City Parking System

Infosys Chandigarh Campus is Located in SEZ Rajiv Gandhi Infotech Park.
The Campus holds two large building SDB1 & SDB2
One Of the Smartest Campus in IT segment

The Parking Challenge
“Parking Full at 1030 hrs on Weekdays “
A huge parking facility at upper & lower basements with Parking Capacity for more than 1200 Cars.
Zone wise distribution of Parking was an need. Also requirement for availability of Reserved Parking.
It was Important to Display present real time Parking Capacity to Employees at the entrance gate.

Smart Parking

Parking Display at Entrance Gate of SDB1
End-User Needs
“Prior to new solution, two security officers monitored downtown parking during the day, manually entering license plates into handheld devices which transferred records to central database as well as to each other’s handhelds. Each officer required approximately 3.5-4 hours to complete a full circuit,” said Officials. “Outside of downtown, an officer would drive around to time-limited areas, park, physically chalk vehicles, record license plate information by hand in notebooks and then begin again.”
“To manage the overnight parking exemptions, a list of overnight permits would be physically printed out onto a piece of paper, and officers would patrol on foot at night to check the license plates against the exemption list. These officers would also patrol the municipal parking lots at night on foot.”
Infosys was looking for a new system that would increase their team’s efficiency .They needed a system that could handle a multitude of parking types, including Reserved Zones, A, B,C,D,E & F. The System needed to count number of Cars coming in & going out of the facility.
The Perfect Solution
Infosys issued an RFP (request for proposal) to solicit possible solutions and received a number of responses. Among the proposals was one simple solution for Counting Vehicles Indoor & Outdoor. The use of Loop Detectors to detect vehicles entering each zone different zones. Every vehicle passing over the loop is registered or counted & stored in database. Additional small displays at every zone entrance are mounted to give present parking status of the particular zone. This makes the driver aware of availability of Parking in that zone. It also indicates Security officers about any vehicle which has been parked longer than allowable time period.
To use the system, operators need simply to select the appropriate zone within the software, which includes the specific enforcement rules, and then drive through all areas of the zone. The Software will automatically scan and record all data pertaining to surrounding vehicles, compare that information to its database, and alert the operator if any vehicle is in infraction, requiring ticketing or other action.

Zone Displays

The installation of the system went smoothly, and four security officers were trained to use software so that they could assist the remaining officers in learning the new protocol. The system includes a RS485 connection, with a local Host Computer as Master Controller for the Smart Parking management System .This Master Controller Stores & Calculates Signals received from Loop Sensor .It also updates database, which manages their various Integration. Further to this a public-facing portion of this database has to be created, which allows Employees to log in on the Web and Mobile App Send special overnight parking exemptions, etc. This will enable automation of exemption entry into Software. A number of the special Zone wise permits associated with Parking lots have also been integrated with the system and we hope to expand this to the private lots soon, creating a unified and automated permitting and exemption database to interface .We are currently in the process of tying our software into the police database in order to help locate wanted or stolen vehicles and alert law enforcement to their whereabouts.
Parking Display Software

The Benefits
Our Parking Management system has more than met Infosys need for a great increase in Parking patrolling efficiency. Instead of two security officers patrolling the area by foot, there is now one on-foot officer who manages only specific, anomalous pockets such as no-parking areas. A second officer patrols the larger areas through the software. The third officer who was previously in charge of physically chalking wheels has been able to reassign all of his time to other enforcement. Overnight patrols have also been made drastically more efficient by enabling a simple drive through the zone as opposed to painstaking patrols on foot with paper lists of Counting Vehicles in each zone.
In addition to increased efficiency in the parking arena, the availability of Parking has increased as well. For example, Movement from Zones of Vehicles has smoothened as now drivers only follow one directions& find Parking following the zone display direction & availability count. Response time between Zones Display update is less than 200ms which results in faster data available.