By Bern Grush

Most of us in the parking industry are aware that the days of the parking meter are waning. But these machines will not disappear suddenly. Rather they will experience a long slow decline over the next decade, in many ways repeating what the phone booth has just been through. How meter attrition will be managed is a key consideration for your city’s next meter refresh—especially because it should be your last one. The wrong choice could mean a significant loss.

In March 2014, Dennis Burns wrote about the success of the Washington, D.C. pay-by-phone program: “…the D.C. program has earned 550,000 customers and accounts for 40 percent of the city’s parking revenues. About 80 percent of the seven million transactions to date employ smart phones, with payment options that include credit cards, an online and mobile money management solution, and PayPal.”

When will you go meterless?

While we have come some distance since the first parking meter in the 1930s, we will progress much further in the next few years. As automobiles get smarter, the act of pausing to pay for parking – even on a smartphone – will become unnecessary and increasingly undesirable. High enforcement costs are driving cities toward digital credentials tied to license plates that can be rapidly scanned for payment confirmation. New technologies are enabling more robust analytics that allow flexible pricing management. Older style, curbside meters—both single space meters (SMSs) and multi-space meters (MSMs) delay this progress.

The current supply of on-street meters in North America ranges from a full complement of pay-by-license plate meters, such as in Calgary and Pittsburgh, to none at all. At some point in the foreseeable future, parking will be managed in the great majority of all these cities by all-digital means including phone, Web or in-vehicle, self-paying meters. Accompanying…

By Tony DiGiovanni

Slip and fall claims are a serious threat to your parking operations just like they are in the snow and ice management industry. The snow industry represented by Landscape Ontario and the Canadian Nursery Landscape Association (CNLA) received a shock a number of years ago when an insurance carrier decided they were no longer interested in insuring snow operations because of the financial risks. Even though members collectively paid millions of dollars, the insurance company decided not to renew. This was a wake-up call. Risk management has become the number one priority for the ice and snow management sector.

In April, a Snow and Ice Summit was organized by the CNLA risk management committee in order to bring together all stakeholders in a common effort to deal with the issue. The Canadian Parking Association was at the table to hear from other stakeholders and to provide insight from its members’ perspective.

The summit began with an introduction by Gerald Boot (Chair). He spoke about the challenges of slip and fall claims and how the situation will get worse unless we work together to find solutions. It is no longer possible to download all the risks to the contractor through “hold harmless” clauses in the contract. Eventually insurance rates will become exorbitant, or in some cases insurance will be impossible to get. The issue affects all stakeholders.

Lawyer Robert Kennaley gave a lawyer’s perspective on the issue. He stressed that if all stakeholders joined together we would have the opportunity to improve best practices, save money, do better with environmental stewardship, save crumbling infrastructure and improve safety and quality of life. He talked about the problems of transferring risk to the contractor. One-sided agreements do not work. It is expensive to transfer risk. It encourages more salt use and therefore costs….

By Lyndon McLean

Winter salt is an inexpensive and easy way to deal with icy patches. Trucks salting roadways and neighbours spreading a little de-icer on the front sidewalk are familiar sight. But as a tragedy such as the collapse of the Algo Centre Mall in Elliot Lake shows, there can be high costs associated with overuse of salt and a lack of facility maintenance.

The Smart About Salt Council is an independent, not-for-profit organization dedicated to protecting the environment through programs that improve management of winter salt used to control ice on sidewalks, parking lots and roadways. The council was started by its partners, the Region of Waterloo, Landscape Ontario Horticultural Trades Association, Building Owners and Managers Association of Ottawa, and Ontario Good Roads Association.

In response to concerns over rising levels of sodium and chlorides in municipal drinking water, the Region of Waterloo took action. One of the first large municipalities to recognize that winter salt use is a major problem, they developed an active strategy for more efficient salt use on its roads. But they also developed the Smart About Salt program, designed to teach private contractors and property managers the best practices of salt management that help to reduce its use while still ensuring that public safety is not compromised.

From building owners to snow removal contractors to the general public, each partner has an important stake in ensuring that its members and constituents understand the program’s value in protecting the environment. All partners encourage everyone to participate in and promote this program. For example, the Region of Waterloo now requires all of its contractors that apply salt on its building properties to be registered in the Smart About Salt program, as contracts are renewed.

Smart About Salt’s Guiding Principles

Mission:

• To protect freshwater…
  

By Bern Grush

A self-locating, self-paying parking meter can dramatically improve workflow, enforcement and the political relationship between municipal parking management and its stakeholders. This technology meshes with existing pay-by-phone and pay-and-display systems.

Few parkers are likely to appreciate that municipal parking management is a considerably more complex matter than may appear when they are frustrated by no parking signs, parking citations, poles with multiple confusing instructions, loading zones, handicapped parking, no stopping, variable time limits, too little parking just where they want it, and so on. Municipal parking has many different requirements and there are many stakeholders with conflicting priorities involved in the task of fitting what is sometimes too many automobiles into the scarce spots along our urban streets. In any large urban area and many medium-sized ones, municipal parking management is certainly far more difficult than managing the lots or garages for suburban shopping malls.

Municipalities always want their parking spaces utilized correctly for traffic flow and safety reasons. They generally like to see a sensible occupancy level to ensure a balanced, vibrant commercial downtown—i.e., not so much that access is denied to some or that congestion is inadvertently encouraged. Nor so little that the commercial district might suffer and businesses relocate. Many cities need to generate sufficient revenue to fund the collection and enforcement process, and a significant number even seek to generate a surplus for their treasury.

Business associations want business traffic, including people that arrive in automobiles. This generally results in demand for plentiful free or cheap parking which cities can increasingly ill-afford from a financial or traffic management perspective.

Environmentalists consider the automobile and by association, parking, to be a problem—and they have a point. They may want parking to cost more, or to have less of it available. The logic of parking scarcity to discourage use…

In support of the Regional Growth Strategy policy to encourage reduced residential parking requirements in coordination with frequent transit service, Metro Vancouver conducted one of the most comprehensive studies of apartment parking supply and demand for a metropolitan area. Evidence was gathered from current and emerging trends, discussions with municipal planners and engineers, and developers, and the completion of two regional surveys. From this investigation, key findings and opportunities have been identified for consideration by municipalities and the development industry to achieve a better match between apartment parking supply and demand close to frequent transit.

Executive Summary

Encouraging compact communities, sustainable transportation choices, and housing affordability are well-established objectives in Metro Vancouver’s Regional Growth Strategy and Regional Affordable Housing Strategy. Parking is at the nexus of these objectives. Given that apartments represent over one-half of new housing starts in the region today and will remain so over the next three decades as the population grows by one million people, having current and efficient parking requirements are critical to the achievement of a sustainable region and livable neighbourhoods.

In metropolitan Vancouver, the cost of constructing on-site structured parking can range from $20,000 to $45,000 per stall, plus maintenance costs. Ensuring the parking requirements match actual demand can help reduce unnecessary housing development costs.

The Metro Vancouver Apartment Parking Study is one of the most comprehensive examinations of apartment parking supply and demand conducted on a metropolitan area. Through the exploration of emerging trends, review of past studies, discussions with municipal planners, engineers, and developers, and completion of two regional surveys, a robust evidence base was established.

Current and Emerging Trends

The amount of parking required in new apartment developments should reflect current and emerging trends. Transit ridership continues to increase year after year, in part from improved transit service levels and the expansion of TransLink’s Frequent…

By Neša Matic and Dwight Deugo

The proliferation of mobile devices and our reliance on them for a multitude of our daily tasks and activities has had an impact on the way we use parking services. 

Today, mobile parking services, which are relatively new in Canada, are bringing the benefits of improved convenience of mobile payment and mobility. However, they are also seen as the first steps towards the future of mobile parking, where social media, location-based services and machine-to-machine communications (M2M) play important roles.

While the market adoption of smartphones is shifting the mobile landscape towards high-end users with growing data plans, mobile parking systems aiming to capture wider audiences will continue to embrace the mobile “basics”: text messaging (SMS, short messaging service) and voice technologies (voice recognition). By taking this approach, they significantly expand their target market of prospects and customers, including non-data mobile users (pre-paid), and are able to cater to a wide variety of devices (iOS, Android, Windows).

In Ottawa, there are a few mobile parking payment systems already in operation. This article looks at one such system currently deployed at Carleton University and Algonquin College, through the eyes of two of its users and two of its vendor parking managers. The graphs below show the adoption rate of mobile parking payments at the Carleton University and Algonquin College.

Emilie is a Carleton University student. She normally uses public transportation, but twice a week she drives her father’s car to school. Emilie’s father registered his credit card and Emilie’s mobile phone details with Carleton University’s mobile parking payment system so she can use her mobile phone when parking in one of the university’s lots.

Always in a hurry, Emilie is often late for class. She parks her car in the P1 parking lot…