Pollution Free Cities: What Comes Next after Parking Meters

Thursday, December 16, 2010

What Comes Next after Parking Meters

Time Expired - The end of the parking meter (Slate, Oct. 19, 2010)

Also discussed here: Prize-winning innovators Skymeter could revolutionize parking -- and eliminate traffic (YongeStreet, Jun. 2, 2010)

And here: Skymeter

And here: Who pays for free parking? (Pollution Free Cities Aug. 23, 2010)

Congestion and air fouled by emissions from traffic on downtown streets are the result of several factors. One is simply too much traffic and one solution is to impose congestion charges as a way of reducing traffic and generate revenue to cover the large and growing costs of road repair and maintenance which was discussed in The Canadian Case for Congestion Pricing (Pollution Free Cities, Aug. 19, 2010) and Congestion Pricing in Chicago (Pollution Free Cities, Jul. 29, 2010)

. A second issue is how effectively parking on and off the streets is managed to not only reduce endless circling of cars looking for an open space, but also to generate revenue that might be put to solutions such as public transit that ease traffic volume. The article under review today looks at the history of the traditional parking meter, concluding that better technologies and traffic management techniques exist that offer more.

Key Quotes:

“Seventy-five years ago, the world's first parking meter cast its thin, ominous shadow on the streets of Oklahoma City”

“a survey found that at any given time, 80 percent of the city's spots were occupied by employees of downtown businesses—the very same businesses complaining that lack of parking was driving away shoppers”

“Aaron Adiv and Wanzhi Wang produced a wonderfully detailed paper titled "On Street-Parking Meter Behavior,".. That meter occupancy was nearly 100 percent; that four in five parkers used the meters for less than an hour; that the "real cost" to parkers of fees and fines had actually declined over the past few decades; and, strikingly, that enforcement is quite low. Only 8.1 percent of violations were ticketed”

"Parking spots are the curb lane of your streets. Your streets are the primary public space in your city. They are intimately connected with everything that happens in the city."

“the advent of any number of new systems for paying for parking…pay-by-mobile-phone parking providers (for example, Parkmobile), which require drivers to put the code of a parking space into an app rather than coins into a meter..also "park and walk away" systems, like one being tested in Winnipeg, Manitoba, which essentially put the meter in one's car”

“The company's Skymeter product is a GPS-based road-use meter that is currently used in Winnipeg to bill drivers for parking (on a no-tag-necessary, by-the-minute system that eliminates the risk of parking tickets)..takes readings from the car and turns them into financial transactions, while protecting the privacy of the driver.”