Government tightens loophole validating airport parking fines
In April, PCI reported on a legal requirement in airport parking fines resulting in fines being issues by unauthorised people, with fines potentially dating back to 2004 becoming invalid. Read more about this in PCI’s blog post ‘Flaw in airport parking fines’. Last week, Federal Transport Minister Anthony Albanese moved to pass a bill called […]
Parking Matters update
Last week, PCI posted about the launch of the International Parking Institute’s new program ‘Parking Matters’, an industry-wide program for advancing the parking profession. The first initiatives of the program will be to target groups such as architects, city planners, law enforcement entities, transit authorities, university leaders and building developers – people identified as those […]
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, […]
Parking matters
As the International Parking Institute (IPI) International Parking Conference & Expo begins in Las Vegas, the official kick-off of a major new initiative for advancing the parking profession will commence. Called ‘Parking Matters’, the program is a focused public relations drive to educate and increase awareness of the value of parking professionals amongst target audiences […]
Newcastle City Council plans to raise parking meter fees
Meanwhile, on the other side of Sydney, Newcastle City Council has announced a review of their parking policies, including parking fees, as part of a coastal Masterplan. Newcastle CBD has had paid parking in place for many years now, but the Masterplan is also proposing to extend paid parking to the beaches. Newcastle City Council […]
Ash cloud airport parking refunds
Last week, as the first flights from Europe started taking off, both Brisbane and Sydney Airports announced that they would refund any parking charges incurred by passengers and air crew delayed overseas by the volcanic ash cloud crisis. Sydney Airport also announced that they will refund or allow free rescheduling of the pre-paid long term […]
Cost of owning a car in the UK goes through the roof
Over the past month, car owners in the UK have been hit with a ‘double-whammy’ on the cost of running their cars. Petrol prices have hit a new record high in April, with drivers in many parts of the country paying more than the previous peak of 119.7 pence a litre, set in July 2008. […]
Australian construction industry to shrink
Economic forecasting group BIS Shrapnel has projected that Australia’s civil construction industry, including roads, transport, utilities and mining, will shrink over the next few years. In its latest report, the company says civil construction growth has more than doubled in the last five years, and further growth of 9 to 10 per cent is expected […]
Electric charging infrastructure and roll-out in Adelaide
Adelaide City Council officially opened the first electric car charging station in the CBD’s Grote Street UPark. Adelaide Lord Mayor Michael Harbison said that if the infrastructure were in place, demand for electric cars would grow. “With these new charging points, we’re encouraging residents and City commuters to take a fresh look at their travel […]
So long suburbia
A new study published by the Environmental Protection Agency in the US has indicated that construction in urban cores and older suburbs of US cities is beginning to catch up with the pace of home construction in the outer suburbs – meaning that the ‘suburban sprawl’ may be beginning to slow. In a study of […]
San Francisco parking sensors
The San Francisco trial of a wireless smart-parking sensor system is now underway, allowing users to tap into a centralised network with either a computer or smart phone to find available parking spaces. For the driver, the benefit of the smart parking system is not just the increased efficiency in finding free parking spaces. If […]
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 […]
The biggest winner
Some say England’s permanently jammed M25 (“The London Orbital Car Park”) is the biggest car park in the world. However, Canada’s West Edmonton Shopping Mall, with 20,000 spaces, holds the Guinness World Record for the largest parking lot. Can you tell us which is the biggest free-standing car park in Australia?
Wollongong introduces paid parking in city centre
On March 22, Wollongong City Council introduced on-street ‘pay and display’ machines throughout the city centre. Motorists are charged a $2 flat fee to park in half-hour, one-hour, or two-hour zones, no matter how long they stay in the parking space. “Topping up” the meters is illegal and motorists who overstay the time limit, whether […]
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 […]
City of Victoria implements Pay by Space on-street parking system
This week, Parking Consultants International spoke with Ismo Husu, from the Parking Services department of the City of Victoria, in British Columbia, Canada. The City of Victoria has recently installed a new on-street parking system, based on a pay-by-space principle. Ismo explained to us: “The users can keep their receipt that gives the expiry time. […]
Australian Parking Convention update
The Parking Association of Australia announced recently the key note speaker for its 2010 convention – Donald Shoup, Professor of Urban Planning at the University of California, and author of the landmark book titled ‘The High Cost of Free Parking’. As supporters of the ‘Shoupian’ theories of parking pricing (increasing the cost of on-street parking, […]
Davis Langdon construction sentiment findings report March
During the past three months, Davis Langdon’s Construction Sentiment Index fell by a surprising 5 points to reach 61. Davis Langdon attributes the decline in the index to a concerned property industry that is being impacted by a combination of planning and industrial relations issues. According to David Langdon, this is unexpected, and suggests a […]
New York city on-street parking grace period
New York City’s new ‘five minute grace’ period on parking meters comes into effect this week. Essentially this means that if a meter is recorded by an enforcement officer as being over time, they must wait five minutes before writing the ticket. Whilst the process of how this will actually work is not clear at […]
Car park costs reach new levels across Australia
Following on from our recent post ‘Are car park bays good investments?’, we thought we would republish some figures relating to how much car parks are selling for across Australia: are you sitting down? The record price in Australia is $240,000 for a single lock-up space in Brighton Boulevard in Sydney’s North Sydney CBD car […]
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, […]
Car park planning
Cristina Lynn, Managing Partner of PCI, recently delivered the above presentation on the benefits of good planning to the car park development process. Particularly relevant to urban planners and councils, the presentation provides an overview of car park planning processes, including optimal space calculation, design, ‘green’ parking and other initiatives for consideration in optimising the […]
What do your car and your steak have in common?
NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies published the results of a study into the earth’s climate on February 18, analysing the impact of different industry sectors on it. They have discovered and described certain airborne chemicals that can trap incoming sunlight and warm the climate, while others cool the planet by blocking the Sun’s rays. […]
Preserving historical architecture
This building is a 17th century condominium in Crema, Northern Italy – the Palazzo Compostella già Dolfin. At first glance it seems perfectly normal, but in fact it hides an underground car park by the brilliant use of hydraulic stacking technology. The end result is a garage that stores 18 cars invisibly underground, with the […]
Karma for bicycle road rager
Our favourite Green website, TreeHugger, has delivered one of the best (or rather worst) stories we’ve read thus far in 2010. A driver in the UK recently had an attack of cyclist road rage. And attack he did! The teenage driver pulled up alongside the cyclist, sounded his horn and yelled “Get off the road. […]
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 […]
Melbourne’s CBD parking demand grows and grows
Melbourne City Council recently released figures (Feb 3) on the state of parking in the Melbourne CBD area, analysing increases in demand and supply over the past four years. The number of people working in the city has grown by 40,000 in that time, and the resident population has increased by more than 4,000. In […]
NSW Government releases Transport Blueprint
As anticipated, the NSW Government released their Transport Blueprint on Monday February 22. Not flawlessly, however, with a minor glitch accidentally placing a number of documents outlining key announcements on a public website on the Friday prior. The 10 year, $10 billion plan sees the cancellation of the metro network with funds diverted to the […]