Cash for clunkers
The US Senate recently passed a ‘Cash for Clunkers’ program, allowing owners of old, emission-heavy vehicles, to receive up to USD$4500 when they trade them in for new, fuel efficient vehicles. Environmental website TreeHugger, in an article entitled Cash for Clunkers Passes – Auto Industry Saved? Blue Skies Ahead? explores the issue both from the perspective […]
Mirvac calls it a day on car park management
Mirvac has announced that it is in the process of disbanding the car park management side of its business, reports The Australian. According to the article, it is in the process of signing over nine of its larger car parks to Wilson Parking, and handing the management of two of its shopping centre car parks, […]
Didn’t plan for this…
We came across an interesting article in the Canberra Times this week about the most planned of all Australian cities, Canberra. Architects and sustainability experts are concerned about the increasing rate of urban sprawl in the city, especially in the northern suburbs, and the impact on the city’s future. “But the more that planning and […]
Canberra to become Australia’s first electric recharge city
In another story on Canberra this week, it has been announced that our capital will become the first Australian city and only the third in the world to support electric cars, with an international company pledging to establish recharge points in the capital’s homes, workplaces and shopping centres within three years. The company facilitating the […]
Condor Towers Car Park
Last weekend’s social scene in Perth saw a relatively unique event on the calendar – the opening of the Condor Towers car park in Perth. Not usually something to make much of a fuss about? A while ago the developers of Condor Towers asked artist group OLOLO if they could ‘art up’ the 5 level […]
Parking officer survey reveals rising rate of abuse and assaults
We recently published a post about parking rangers, titled ‘The People vs The Parking Police’, which explored some of the consumer frustrations with parking police. On Tuesday (July 28), a report was published by the United Services Union exposing the other viewpoint – that of the parking rangers. The report, ‘Moving on for Safety’, publishes […]
San Francisco City Parking Report
The San Francisco County Transportation Authority recently presented a report with in-depth recommendations and strategies for managing on and off-street parking, congestion and zoning districts across the city. The Transportation Authority clearly embraced market principles for pricing in accordance with demand for space so that parking, particularly in commercial districts and spillover neighborhoods, is best […]
Car park ads three times less effective than shopping centre ads?
A report published by the Survey Sampling Institute research firm, on behalf of outdoor advertising company Eye, called Mall ads more effective, has found that ads placed in shopping centres were considerably more effective than those placed in car parks. They found the shopping centre ads to be three times more memorable, four times more […]
Why advancements in fuel efficiency aren’t all that efficient
Courtesy of TreeHugger comes a report about vehicle fuel efficiency. This article, entitled ‘No wonder fuel economy is stagnant, cars ballooned up since 1980′, talks about how gains in the size, weight and horsepower in passenger cars have more than overcompensated for recent improvements in fuel efficiency. We found this excerpt to be most telling, sourced from […]
Pedestrian casualties in rush to bag a car park
Brisbane’s Courier Mail explores the increasing incidence of pedestrians being struck by drivers in busy car parks, desperate to beat other motorists to available parking bays. Compensation lawyers are getting in on the act too, and AAMI reports that as many as 70% of drivers have had bad experiences in shopping centre car parks, from damage […]
Drive-by chalkings
For anyone who currently takes the parking risk on a regular basis – watch out! A new drive-by spy camera, which electronically scans the position of parked cars is being trialed in Australia. Mounted to a vehicle driven by a parking ranger, it scans parked cars at two separate intervals, noting the colour, shape, size […]
CBD parking costs through the roof
Following up from our post last week, ‘Colliers International Global CBD Parking Rate Survey’, the Sydney Morning Herald has published their take on the report, including additional information about the cost of investing in car parks as a property investment, and commentary from Wendy Machin of the NRMA. Whilst the inclusion of Sydney in the […]
A tax grab!
We have come across another article on the Sydney parking levy, this one published by the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation). With the parking industry saying that there are no studies that validate the claim that the additional tax will ease congestion, which is the claimed rationale from the Government behind the tax rise, the Government is […]
Colliers International Global CBD Parking Rate Survey 2009
Colliers International have just released their Global CBD Parking Rate Survey for 2009. The survey, which tracks 140 downtown parking districts around the world, found that Australia’s capital cities ranked among the most expensive places in the world to park. Sydney, Brisbane and Perth again all ranked in the top 10 cities globally for the […]
The people vs the parking police
There have been a lot of articles that have come to our attention this week about conflicts between parking inspectors, doing their job by the rule book, and affected and perturbed residents and car parkers, saying that ruling by the ‘letter of the law’ without any consideration for circumstance is unreasonable. We’ve found three interesting […]
Finding your car made easy by colour
This art project, ‘Color Coordinated Parking’ conducted at California’s Southwestern College in 1994, sorted over 3,000 cars into parking lots determined by the colour of the vehicle. It’s a brilliant conceptual idea as well as a potentially useful marketing tool… but would it help you find where you parked your white Toyota Corolla in a […]
What are the key things investors look for in a car park?
Sourced from Parking World’s blog, the article ‘Parking remains attractive for investors’ explores some of the key things that make a car park an attractive investment. According to the article, authored by Macquarie Group, three characteristics have a meaningful impact on the attractiveness to potential investors: Demonstrated ability to retain locations and grow the portfolio […]
Revenue control
We have spent a lot of time over the past few months talking about the maximisation of revenue from car parks. As everyone is all too aware, these times call for improved systems and monitoring to ensure that all assets are performing as well as they can be. ‘Is Revenue Control An Oxymoron’ is an […]
Retail shopping experiences start in the car park
We came across an article this week, written by Kevin Moore, CEO of Crossmark Australia, which talks about the experience of retail shopping. It draws upon Paco Underhill’s latest book, The Call of the Mall, which presents the concept of “retail theatre”. In the article, ‘Shopping should start in the carpark’, Moore discusses car manufacturer […]
London on-street parking permits study
London, as one of the most urbanised and populated cities in the world, continues to face an increasing number of cars in use on the roads, with relatively little or no additional availability of parking. The number of registered cars in the city has increased by 10% to 2.6 million vehicles in just the last […]
World Parking Symposium
The World Parking Symposium commenced on Wednesday (24 June 2009) in Breda, the Netherlands. Our Managing Partner, Cristina Lynn will be attending several events at the conference and also delivering a presentation on the benefits of parking guidance systems. We will be publishing her presentation for our blog subscribers in due course, so watch this […]
NSW budget and implications on the parking and property industry
The NSW mini-budget was released on Monday June 15, with some interesting and relevant implications for the industry. Of course, the most notable feature of the mini-budget was a fiscal stimulus which will provide a temporary 50% cut to the stamp duty for people buying newly constructed dwellings, valued up to $600,000, until December 2009. […]
Station(ary) Parking
We read an article in the June 2009 edition of the British Parking Institute’s magazine titled “Is rail parking on track?” which addresses the issue of commuter parking at railway stations. Interestingly the article states that passengers leaving their cars at train stations is second only in the environmental stakes to getting there by public […]
The car park of the future? Part 2.
We wish we knew where this image came from, other than as we saw it on the Cool Hunter website, on a post entitled ‘Is that really a car park?’
Are car parks just there to park cars in?
When was the last time you saw a movie that did not at least have one scene in a car park? And now, car parks have become sought after venues for parties and special events ….. Saint Laurent and Givenchy would turn in their graves! With Sydney abuzz recently with the stylish designers and chic […]
A metered debate?
With our offices based in Mosman, it has been impossible for us not to notice the debate currently underway between residents and the Council, following their proposal to install parking meters at Balmoral Beach. Leaving aside the obvious dilemma of who pays for parking, we did come across an interesting article published this week detailing […]
European trends for road user charging and congestion charging
Based on a report by Frost & Sullivan, ‘Key Growth Trends in the European Markets for Road User Charging, Congestion Charging, Public Transport & Ticketing and Parking’, several notable trends appear to be emerging from the European (particularly Western European) market. As the usage of road tolls increases, the technology for the automatic tolling becomes […]
Sydney braces for impact of parking levy on July 1
With the NSW State’s increased parking levy due to come into effect from July 1, parking operators in Sydney claim that they will begin closing parking bays from next month, with the 110% tax increase rendering some parking spots economically unsustainable. Published in the Sydney Morning Herald on June 6, Bay Watch: parking operators’ fury […]
Car park values remain strong
With the Aquavista Car Park in Melbourne’s Docklands up for sale with an asking price of around $5 million for 109 bays, this article in The Age examines the state of the market for this “special” category of property. Read the full article online. ‘Car park values remain strong’.
A three-hundred point turn
Sometimes, near enough IS good enough. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irYHMDBf4t0