NPA Third Annual Parking Survey
The National Parking Association (USA) released their Third Annual Review of Parking Rates in North America this month. Key findings of this year’s study include: Parking facilities in and near airports were hit hardest, with 56 percent of on-airport and 44 percent of off-airport facilities reporting a decrease in 2009 revenues. Municipal operators and facilities […]
Drivers ‘spend a year looking for spaces’
A UK survey released this week claims that drivers lose a year of their lives searching for a parking space – the equivalent of more than six days a year circling streets and car parks looking for a spot. Based on a motorists’ driving ‘life’ of around 50 years, the lost time adds up to […]
Will hands free video help reduce parking officer abuse?
Following our recent blog post in regards to the ongoing and increasing violence, aggression and abuse towards parking officers in Australia (see our post ‘Parking rangers continue to be the targets of abuse’), one council has taken further action to try and combat the growing problem. The City of Holdfast Bay in Adelaide, South Australia, […]
Cheap parking phone application
Another phone application has recently launched: ‘Cheap Parking’ is designed specifically as an independent car park comparison app for Australia, New Zealand and Singapore. It covers all private operators including Secure Parking, Wilson Parking, Interpark and Grimes, as well as council, shopping centre, hotel and hospital car parks. The app allows you, the user, to factor […]
Why simple design is often complex
Parking World magazine has recently published an article penned by George Burton, Parking Consultant International’s design guru. The article, called ‘Why simple design is often complex’, explores the path a design process usually takes in order to arrive at a desirable product and to present an overview of the relevant factors that influence the process […]
British Parking Association publishes Hospital Parking Charter
Last weekend I was catching up on a backlog of industry publications and read an interesting article by Peter Guest in the June 2010 edition of Parking World which reminded me of a related article we recently posted in our blog. The subject of Peter’s article was Hospital Parking and the on-going discussions about whether […]
Card security breached in Queenstown
Last week, a number of credit card scams hit Queenstown (New Zealand), with the Man Street car park the focus of the breach of security. Customers who had used their credit cards for payments at the car park were phoned by their card companies and notified that fraudulent transactions had taken place later in the […]
Burwood Council sells car park for $22.5m
According to the Australian Financial Review, Burwood Council in Sydney’s inner west has sold a public car park to an Asian property developer for $22.5 million. The public car park, on the corner of Belmore Street and Wynne Avenue in Burwood, covers an area of 5,469m² ($4,114/m²) and has a 60m height limit. The property […]
Colliers Parking Rates Survey – North America
Global real estate firm Colliers has just released their North America Parking Rate Survey 2010. Midtown New York City has the region’s highest garage parking rates, according to Colliers: a median of $20 an hour, $40 a day and $538 a month. The survey includes central business districts in 44 U.S. urban areas and 12 […]
Highlights and comparisons of parking in Asian cities
Paul Barter, a Singapore-based academic researching urban transport policy, runs a blog and resource that PCI follows regularly, called ‘Reinventing Urban Transport’. He specialises in the urban cities of South East Asia in particular; and recently published a presentation summarising the results of an Asian Cities Parking Study, and key governing policies in these cities. […]
Adelaide City Council stands firm on parking tickets
To end our weekly post on a lighter note, we came across an article listing a range of excuses to avoid parking fines that have been received by the Adelaide City Council. Being ‘bitten by a wombat’, ‘trapped at the zoo’, or ‘not able to read the parking sign because I am legally blind’ are […]
Sydney public transportation use increases
Last week (June 28), the Sydney Morning Herald reported that despite increasing car ownership levels in Sydney, public transportation use was on the rise. The NSW Government’s annual household travel survey found that rail travel was up 3 per cent and bus travel up 2.5 per cent in 2008-09. Car trips fell by almost 1 […]
Other wireless parking applications
This week we have come across two other applications that our readers may be interested in. The first comes from The City of Eugene, in Oregon, US, where a small, free application called “Epark” was developed, which shows all available parking options, both on-street, and off-street, managed by the City administration. It provides information on […]
Wireless parking in San Francisco
Last week’s post on wireless parking applications and technology generated an interesting response from our followers. Many examples led us back to San Francisco’s SFPark project (read our original post ‘San Francisco Parking Sensors’ here). The project is based on Donald Shoup’s theories of market-priced parking rates, with the rates being constantly adjusted to suit […]
ACT Government is right to lift car parking fees
The Property Council of Australia has joined the debate in support of the planned increase in parking rates in Canberra, with its ACT Executive Director, Catherine Carter, claiming that the negative media attention about the level of car parking charges levied by the ACT Government is diverting attention from the real problems facing Canberra commuters […]
Research ranks Australian cities as best and worst to drive
In research undertaken between December 2009 and January 2010, Virgin Car Insurance analysed Australian capital cities and Regional Centres on a number of key criteria to determine a ranking system for the ‘friendliest’ cities to drive in. Key criteria differed slightly between capital cities and regional cities, but both included data such as the average […]
Man stole $290,000 from parking meters
A Melbourne man has admitted stealing almost $290,000 from City of Melbourne parking meters in 2007 and 2008. He obtained the cash while working for a company contracted to collect the council’s parking revenue, National Protective Services. Nine workers involved in the scam would immediately pocket small amounts of coins extracted from the meters, while […]
New Zealand asks FBI to help nail hackers
PCI recently wrote about the theft of credit card details from payment machines at the Downtown Car Park in central Auckland in November (see previous blog posts ‘Auckland Downtown credit card scam and PCI compliance ’ and ‘Another reason to be PCI compliant’). The victims of the scam, which had gone undetected for some time, […]
Flaw in airport parking fines
Australian airports have been under increasing pressure of late in respect to the pricing of parking, following the release of the ACCC’s report into pricing and service levels in March. Last week, Transport Department officials discovered that about 70,000 parking infringements were issued at airports around Australia that are invalid, because the parking officer authorisations […]
Wollongong on-street meter follow up
Last week, PCI posted a report on the installation of paid parking meters in the NSW town of Wollongong (see post Wollongong introduces paid parking in city centre here). Indeed, the local newspaper, the Illawarra Mercury, has seized on the emotion-charged topic with Spanish-inquisition-esque zeal; publishing at least a story a day to their website […]
Lane Cove car park to install license plate recognition technology
The Market Square car park, situated in the Sydney suburb of Lane Cove, is set to become the first ticketless parking station in Australia, with the introduction of license-plate recogniton technology, when it opens in June. The system works by taking pictures of each vehicle’s number plate and recording the time as it enters the […]
The cost of congestion
The State of Australian Cities Report released on Friday March 12 concludes that the cost of congestion in our cities will rise to around $20.4 billion by 2020, impacting adversely on Australian productivity. The report is not, however, just concerned with the economic impacts of congestion, but with the social impacts including, for example, the […]
Are car park bays good investments?
Throughout last year, a number of real estate analysts and economists advocated investing in car parks, due to their stability in pricing and ongoing increase in demand, essentially regardless of the market conditions (see old posts Car park values remain strong and What are the key things investors look for in a car park?). PCI […]
On-street parking sensors in Port Macquarie and San Francisco
The Port Macquarie-Hastings Council has recently announced the introduction of on-street parking sensors, which electronically monitor how long the vehicles are parked in the bays and alert rangers when they over-stay time limits. The sensors are planned to be introduced for a 12-week trial under 50 parking spaces in the Port Central Shopping Centre area, […]
Fraud in Australia hotting up
KPMG’s latest issue of the Fraud Barometer reports that the value of fraud detected in Australia has more than doubled in the second half of last year – possibly as the result of the global financial crisis. The number of cases of fraud before the courts in the second half of 2009, at 69, was […]
Manly on-street parking limit under review
In Manly, Sydney’s busiest Northern Beaches traffic centre, the local council has attempted to manage their growing demands for parking with a reduction in the time limit for on-street parking to 30 minutes, with the intention of providing more ‘drop-in, drop-out’ spaces, and uniformity across the entire area. The limit, however, seems to be too […]
Auckland Downtown credit card scam and PCI compliance
Parking Today’s technology editor, Pete Goldin, posted this week about PCI compliance – the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard.The PCI Data Security Standard is a multifaceted security standard that includes requirements for security management, policies, procedures, network architecture, software design and other critical protective measures. You can read more about the twelve core requirements […]
Christie Report on Sydney’s Transportation Development
On Saturday February 13, the Sydney Morning Herald published the first synopsis of the recommendations of the ‘Christie Report’, an independent inquiry headed by the State’s former rail and roads boss Ron Christie, and backed by the Herald. PCI has previously reported on several of the interim recommendations of the report (see Sydney’s Traffic Solutions? […]
Australian Parking Convention – guess who is coming to town?
A guest post from PCI Managing Partner Cristina Lynn Dear Subscribers, The Parking Association of Australia is organising its next biennial convention which will be held in Sydney (at the Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre) between 7th and 9th November 2010. As the chair of the Organising Committee and Treasurer of the PAA I would […]
The cost of building car parks in Belgium and California
Following on from our recent blog posts on the cost of building car parks in various cities (see our blog post How much does it cost to build a car park around the world), PCI published this data to the parking community via business networking communities. We received a good response to the information and […]