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Reinventing Parking    Demand-responsive parking prices: a key element of Adaptive Parking Posted: 13 Jan 2012 05:25 PM PST If your town or city wants a parking system that is fair and efficient and which adapts itself easily to changing conditions then you will also need parking prices that adapt to changing conditions.  Pricing parking is controversial but there is no getting away from its importance for improving parking outcomes.   So a shift towards performance pricing for parking is a key part of the Adaptive Parking agenda. The barriers are political, not practical. We have the technology.  SFPark's performance pricing uses smart parking meters like this one. One key reason to make parking pricing more responsive to demand has been well explained by Donald Shoup. It is to reduce cruising for parking. In districts with saturated on-street parking an alarming percentage of traffic consists of motorists searching for a local parking spot. This is totally unnecessary traffic caused by mismanaged parking! In the Adaptive Parking agenda I would extend this reason a bit further and take aim at ALL queuing for parking (including queues outside parking lots and even invisible queues, like waiting lists for permits).   Why extend performance pricing to minimizing all queuing for parking? Because a second reason to want responsive parking prices is to better reveal market prices for parking in each neighbourhood. Even private sector parking prices can be unresponsive. There is an adage in the parking industry that many operators set their prices by simply 'looking across the street'. Many organizations have long waiting lists for employee parking permits. A broader approach to performance pricing might seek ways to reduce such queues and make parking prices more responsive and less sticky so that they more accurately reflect current conditions.   This post is the third in a series explaining the basics of Adaptive Parking.

Private car-sharing company ZipCar given exclusive use of public street parking Could selling street spaces be Permit Parking by Inside-Booster & News-Star on Wednesday, October 19, 2011 at 9:11pm by Peter von Buol   ZipCar, a private car-sharing company which rents vehicles to its members by-the-hour, has quietly been given exclusive free use of specially-designated on-street parking spaces throughout the city, including some on residential streets.   When a ZipCar sign recently popped up alongside a building on the 1300 block of W. Wellington, a local resident contacted Inside Booster and said she was annoyed the city has started setting aside on-street public parking spaces for the exclusive use of people who drive vehicles owned by ZipCars.    "One parking spot at the Northwest corner of Wellington and Lakewood now has signs put up by the city saying no one can park here except ZipCars. It is a public street and has always been a public parking spot, but now anyone not in a ZipCar will be ticketed and fined for parking there," wrote Betty Geilen.   Indeed, if this is now city policy how long will it be before the city sees the revenue-generating potential in leasing these parking spots to ZipCar or other car-sharing companies?  Or on an even bigger scale by leasing public street parking spaces on city streets to private parties and citizens?   "When I drive back from work at about six o'clock, all the parking spaces are usually already gone [which means] I usually have to park two blocks away. We chose not to put a garage in our back yard because we have an apple tree, which produces oxygen and is therefore 'green' and environmentally-friendly," continued Geilen.   Geilen also complained the signs installed by the city to mark the spot have given the company free city-sponsored advertising.   "They have a prominent spot where there is a lot of foot-traffic right by the bar at Wellington and Lakewood," she said. "It would be impossible fo

    Contact/Feedback   ACR Office   ACR Board of Directors   ACR Advisory Board   Webmaster   Web Editor   Newsletter Editor Back E. Laird Landon, Jr., William B. Locander (1979), "FAMILY LIFE CYCLE AND LEISURE BEHAVIOR RESEARCH", in Advances in Consumer Research Volume 06, eds. William L. Wilkie, Ann Abor : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 133-138. Advances in Consumer Research Volume 6, 1979      Pages 133-138 FAMILY LIFE CYCLE AND LEISURE BEHAVIOR RESEARCH E. Laird Landon, Jr., University of Houston William B. Locander, University of Houston ABSTRACT - The present research investigates the usefulness of Family Life Cycle (FLC) in the study of leisure/recreation behavior. The survey results presented show that FLC groupings capture much of the variance in recreation behavior. Implications are drawn for both public and private sector decision-makers interested in leisure behavior. INTRODUCTION In recent years there has been a growing interest in recreation and leisure research by academics, executives, and public officials (Wells & Gubar, 1966; Omura and Talarzyk, 1975; Voss & Blackwell, 1975). Most of the research to date has focused on describing recreation behavior through large scale surveys. Many of the studies have been atheoretical in that they employ little behavioral theory in the research design. The present article examines the Family Life Cycle (FLC) concept as a useful tool in understanding leisure and recreation behavior. FLC appears to have much potential for explaining leisure behavior because it matches needs with groups of peoples. That is, FLC offers a construct that is both multidimensional and dynamic. Its multidimensional nature is attributed to the fact that FLC is a composite of several important demographic variables. FLC is dynamic because it accounts for the changing family needs and structure over time. If FLC does capture difference

Why the Bike Lane is the Golf Course of the 21st Century Posted on January 26, 2012 Hello Dear Readers, The Sightline Daily, a blog affiliated with a Northwest policy think tank, published an article I wrote about my Stevens Fellowship experience. You can read the article here! A funny story about how the opportunity with Sightline came about. I was waiting at a stoplight near Mercer Street in Seattle in late November and this guy pulled up to me (on his bicycle) and commented on how bad the bicycle infrastructure was at that particular intersection. He noticed that I had no "biking clothes" on and asked me if I'd ever heard of Copenhagen Cycle Chic.  "Copenhagen Cycle Chic is my favorite blog!" I told him. Then we started talking bike politics and eventually I realized he was Alan Durning, the founder of the Sightline Institute. I've been reading the Sightline blog and using their research in my work for years. I really like that this Sightline article came about because of a conversation that started on the bike lane (or..errr…lack of bike lane).  Who needs the golf course when you cycle! Cycling is such a social form of transport. Sean and I were biking in to work a few days before Christmas and bumped into our friend Jed who I hadn't seen in almost a year.  (Jed and his wife recently had a baby!) We rode together along the cold, but sunny, shores of Westlake for about ten minutes and caught up.  It was a great way to start the day and I was happy to know that Jed was doing well. Then, the next morning, Sean and I bumped into Jed again-in almost the same place as the day before-and we shared another pleasant commute together while joking about how we were becoming a bike commuter gang. The morning before I left for Copenhagen I biked downtown alone after saying goodbye to Sean. I was feeling the weight of the goodbye and also some anxiety about professional challenges ahead.  I pedaled slowly along Dexter, my pace matchi

Beyond parking benefit districts Posted: 11 Aug 2012 01:11 AM PDT Emily Washington at the Market Urbanism blog has been doing a book club style review of Donald Shoup's book, The High Cost of Free Parking. It has been a useful process! If you are new to Shoup's parking reform ideas, please take a look right now at the whole series, which can be found here: Chapters 1 - 4, Chapters 5 - 9, Chapters 10 - 14, Chapters 16 - 18, and Chapters 19 - 22. She wrapped up the other day, with the Preface and Afterword to the paperback edition In these two chapters, which Donald Shoup added for the paperback edition of the book, he discusses some of the changes in parking policy since the original edition in 2004. He also reiterates his three prescriptions for saner parking policy: 1) Set the right price for curb parking; 2) Return parking revenue to pay for local public services; 3) Remove parking minimum requirements. She also shared some final thoughts, which I want to take up with this post.  To reiterate, I highly recommend the entire book. I am in complete agreement with Shoup on his first and third recommendations for parking policy, and he clearly and persuasively makes the case for these two arguments. However, the more I think about it, the more I think that his recommendation of parking revenue benefit districts might not be the best solution, even though it would be much better than the status quo. Yes, this policy has successfully built support for performance pricing in some neighborhoods. However, I think that tax abatement districts would build even more support. ... Property taxes are particularly unpopular, and I think abatement would be sufficient to build support for parking prices that eliminate cruising. As Shoup says, charging higher meter rates is not about increasing cities' revenue, but rather about eliminating curb parking shortages. By giving the increases in revenue back to the residents who are paying these higher rate

"Donald Shoup Takes San Francisco Solving the vexing parking problem. Posted March 20, 2012 Print This Post * 3 comments Every so often during his tenure as mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg has tried to push through congestion pricing, in which drivers would have to pay to use city streets in Midtown and Lower Manhattan. That's a popular solution to chronic overcrowding but, like drinking coffee to try to cure a hang over, it doesn't really get to the heart of the matter. More intervention usually doesn't solve the problems that were themselves the result of a prior intervention. Let me explain. Last year I had the opportunity to participate in an online discussion over at Cato Unbound. It focused on Donald Shoup's book The High Cost of Free Parking, which looks at the consequences of not charging for curbside parking. If you've ever tried to find a parking spot on the street in a big city, especially on weekdays, you know how irritating and time-consuming it can be. It may not top your list of major social problems, except perhaps when you're actually trying to do it. In fact, according to Shoup about 30 percent of all cars in congested traffic are just looking for a place to park. The problem though is not so much that there are too many cars, but that street parking is "free." Except, of course, it isn't free. What people mean when they say that some scarce commodity is free is that it's priced at zero. Some cities, such as London, Mayor Bloomberg's inspiration, charge for entering certain zones during business hours - with some success. (As well as unintended consequences: People living in priced zones pay much less for parking and higher demand has driven central London's real-estate prices, already sky high, even higher). But this doesn't really address what may be the main source of the problem: the price doesn't reflect supply and demand. The same kind of chronic congestion will occur with any fixed resource in high d

Carsharing Year in Review - 2011 2011 has been a landmark year for carsharing in the US and worldwide. Here's my annual review of developments in carsharing for 2011. Before getting into specific developments, I'd like to make two general observations: Are we seeing a demographic tipping point? - This was the year when the mainstream marketers admitted that many in Gen Y ("the Millennials") weren't thinking about cars the same way their parents were - they'd rather have their iPhone than a car. Car registrations and VMT are down; significantly fewer teenagers waiting before getting their driver's licenses; and especially an explosion of bicycle use in cities (even those without bike-friendly reputations). I've always thought this 2009 headline in the Globe and Mail (Toronto) newspaper captured this shift in thinking about cars very nicely - "Object of desire or necessary evil?" Parking is fundamental - Parking is a fundamental but often under appreciated aspect of car use. It wasn't until Donald Shoup layed the cards on the table in his landmark "The High Cost of Free Parking" that most of us realized just how fundamental parking really is. And carsharing operators also know how fundamental parking is to the success of their business. That's why designated parking on public streets has been such a holy grail - convenient access and great marketing exposure. And, as you'll see in several items below, some carsharing companies are slicing the parking issue in new ways - car2go and Zebramobil, as well as RelayRides in San Francisco are opting for floating parking (among other things). And while on the topic of parking, I can't ignore the really goofy decisions that led to a bidding war for dedicated on-street parking spaces for carsharing companies in Washington DC during 2011.  DC has had a troubled history with carsharing parking, almost from the start in 2001 on-street parking seemed to generate more negative publicity than I've heard in any other city.  

Rethinking a Lot: The Design and Culture of Parking Eran Ben-Joseph 0 Resenhas Mit Press, 24/02/2012 - 184 páginas There are an estimated 600,000,000 passenger cars in the world, and that number is increasing every day. So too is Earth's supply of parking spaces. In some cities, parking lots cover more than one-third of the metropolitan footprint. It's official: we have paved paradise and put up a parking lot. In ReThinking a Lot, Eran Ben-Joseph shares a different vision for parking's future. Parking lots, he writes, are ripe for transformation. After all, as he points out, their design and function has not been rethought since the 1950s. With this book, Ben-Joseph pushes the parking lot into the twenty-first century. Can't parking lots be aesthetically pleasing, environmentally and architecturally responsible? Used for something other than car storage? Ben-Joseph shows us that they can. He provides a visual history of this often ignored urban space, introducing us to some of the many alternative and nonparking purposes that parking lots have served--from RV campgrounds to stages for "Shakespeare in the Parking Lot." He shows us parking lots that are not concrete wastelands but lushly planted with trees and flowers and beautifully integrated with the rest of the built environment. With purposeful design, Ben-Joseph argues, parking lots could be significant public places, contributing as much to their communities as great boulevards, parks, or plazas. For all the acreage they cover, parking lots have received scant attention. It's time to change that; it's time to rethink the lot.

Walking Walking is healthy and sustainable, and often the quickest and most efficient way to get around, so we are encouraging spectators to walk as much as possible to get to the London 2012 Games. In many cases, walking to a venue is much quicker and easier than you may think. Walking to or from a venue gives you the opportunity to see many sights on the way, and soak up the atmosphere of being in a Host City.  Travelling by foot is the best way to see London, especially during the Games when other forms of transport will be busy. If walking the whole way to your venue in London is not an option, consider getting off the bus or train a stop early to avoid busy stations and see what London has to offer. London 2012 Active Travel Programme The London 2012 Active Travel Programme aims to encourage more walking and cycling in the run-up to the Games, during and after the Games to help London 2012 meet its aim of being the first sustainable Games. Find out more about the Active Travel Programme. Walking to Games venues London 2012 has invested over £10m in making improvements to a network of eight walking and cycling rotues linking different parts of London to the Olympic Park and other venues. The main routes to the Olympic Park and River Zone venues that have been enhanched are: Lea Valley North - routes to the north of the Olympic Park through the Lee Valley Regional Park Epping Forest - a new route from the north-east of the Olympic Park through Wanstead and Epping Forest Elevated Greenway - follows the route of the northern outfall sewer east from the Olympic Park to Beckton Lower Lea and The Royal Docks - from the south of the Olympic Park to the Isle of Dogs, and on to Maritime Greenwich and other River Zone venues via the Thames Path. Limehouse Cut - from Limehouse Basin to the Olympic Park along the Limehouse cut Victoria Park and Stepney - connects the Olympic Park to Islington and Limehouse Basin along the Regent's and Hertford Union Canals

Parking Library Case Studies Cities (40 files) These articles look at specific issues in various cities and possible solutions... Demand Management (25 files) Planning can be the Parking Department's most important tool in the constant quest for a measured response to ever-increasing demand. Design and Construction (4 files) Safety, efficiency and ecology inform the planning and design process - and help ensure that construction meets the goals of the community. Parking and Environment (5 files) How can parking contribute to the global push for cleaner and greener life-styles and systems? Parking Characteristics (17 files) What are the current parameters that define parking issues in the local, national and global context? Parking Research (38 files) Research lies at the core of our decision-making...most modern issues are too complex to understand with only anecdotal evidence. Research provides the hard evidence to inform our theories. Parking Technology (19 files) Modern parking theory and practice utilizes a plethora of equipment and software that was non-existent twenty or thirty years ago. What is available and where can it take us? Policy and Administration (30 files) No amount of technology is effective without informed policies; no amount of informed policies are effective without administration and enforcement. WPS Parking Puzzles (18 files) Every year the conferees get together in groups to tackle a practical Parking Puzzle that relates to parking issues in the host city. These are some of the solutions...

Parking space management: Remove a spot, reduce global warming? January 20, 2011 | 11:20 am   42 0 "Parking management is a critical and often overlooked tool for achieving a variety of social goals," according to a new study released Wednesday by the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy in New York. The study cited improved air quality, reduced greenhouse gas emissions, reduced traffic congestion, improved road safety and revitalized city centers as the key benefits of parking reform. Those benefits have been achieved in various European cities through a mixture of public policies, regulatory tools and physical design attributes, the study found. In Amsterdam and certain boroughs of London, for example, drivers pay more to park cars that emit higher levels of carbon dioxide. In Hamburg and Zurich, every new off-street parking space that is built is matched with the removal of one on-street space. In Madrid, physical barriers are used to prevent parking in pedestrian pathways. In Copenhagen, parking spaces have been eliminated and repurposed into bike paths. Other tools in use across Europe include increased parking fees to reduce parking space occupancy and the need for cars to cruise around searching for spaces; taxes on employers for each parking space available to employees; and limiting the number of parking spaces developers are allowed to build. "What's happening in China and India and many other rapidly urbanizing places is they are simply copying the model of the U.S. that has dominated urban development for the last 60 years," said Michael Kodransky, global research manager for the nonprofit group and co-author of its report, "Europe's Parking U-Turn: From Accommodation to Regulation."  "What we found through this work is that Europe was on a very similar trajectory, but it started to shift away from just catering to increased demand. For a long time there was a connection between economic prosperity and motorization, an

Call for a parking strategy for better management that can control traffic chaos as well as dampen parking demand and car usage A diverse group of city regulators, civil society representatives and experts from cities across the world gathered in the capital today for a dialogue on Parking Reforms for a Liveable City, organised by Centre for Science and Environment Parking crisis is the result of growing dependence on cars and availability of free parking.  Solutions do not lie in capturing more valuable urban land for car parks, but in shifting to other modes and releasing the space for other important uses  Parking devours close to 8-10 per cent of urban land in Delhi; daily addition of new cars creates additional demand for land bigger than 300 football fields. But cars pay nothing or a pittance for using the valuable land Car parking is choking roads, walkways, green spaces, when cars carry only 14 per cent of travel trips in the city. Is this sustainable? A car needs about 23 sq m to be comfortably parked. But a very poor family in Delhi gets a plot of just 18-25 sq.m. Is this acceptable?   The conference recommended - manage parking well, pay for parking, limit parking where good public transport is available, and give people more attractive options for travel New Delhi, August 17, 2011: Cities must f

"US Parking Reform 101 (four short videos) Want a crash course on parking reform? Then check out these short videos on parking policy and parking reform. There are four, and each is only five minutes in length. Entitled 'Smart Parking', they were produced by the Nelson\Nygaard consulting firm for the San Francisco Bay Area's Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC). They are narrated by N\N parking expert, Jeffrey Tumlin. They provide an excellent introduction to parking issues. Well done! They are especially relevant for North America but should be useful even you are in India or Brazil of South Africa."

Lots of Parking: Land Use in a Car Culture John A. Jakle, Keith A. Sculle 3 Resenhas Lots of Parking: Land Use in a Car Culture, 01/06/2004 - 293 páginas When the automobile was first introduced, few Americans predicted its fundamental impact, not only on how people would travel, but on the American landscape itself. Instead of reducing the amount of wheeled transport on public roads, the advent of mass-produced cars caused congestion, at the curb and in the right-of-way, from small midwestern farm towns to New York, Chicago, Detroit, and Los Angeles. Lots of Parking examines a neglected aspect of this rise of the automobile: the impact on America not of cars in motion but of cars at rest. While most studies have tended to focus on highway construction and engineering improvements to accommodate increasing flow and the desire for speed, John A. Jakle and Keith A. Sculle examine a fundamental feature of the urban, and suburban, scene -- the parking lot. Their lively and exhaustive exploration traces the history of parking from the curbside to the rise of public and commercial parking lots and garages and the concomitant demolition of the old pedestrian-oriented urban infrastructure. In an accessible style enhanced by a range of interesting and unusual illustrations, Jakle and Sculle discuss the role of parking in downtown revitalization efforts and, by contrast, its role in the promotion of outlying suburban shopping districts and its incorporation into our neighborhoods and residences. Like Jakle and Sculle's earlier works on car culture, Lots of Parking will delight and fascinate professional planners, landscape designers, geographers, environmental historians, and interested citizens alike. Published in association with the Center for American Places

The future of residential parking in the Netherlands: the impact of increasing car ownership on the character of residential areas Making parking management an effective tool in travel planning Workplace parking levies: the Macbeth of the demand management world? "E-PARKING" - user-friendly e-commerce to optimise parking space Impact of maximum parking standards including inward investment implications Parking policy to improve accessibility in industrial areas.

Publications Note: Several of these documents contain draft versions of published work (or in different stages of being published). For citations and quotations please refer to the officially published version. The contents of this site can be freely used for personal use ONLY. Although the material contained in this web site is freely available, it is not public domain. Its contents, in whole or in part (including graphics and datasets), cannot be copied and published in ANY form (printed or electronic) without consent. Permission to use any graphic material herein in any form of publication, such as an article, a book or a conference presentation, on any media must be requested prior to use. Books | Book Chapters | Articles in Preparation | Refereed Articles | Special Issues | Reviews & Reports Books Rodrigue, J-P, T. Notteboom and J. Shaw (2012) (eds) The Sage Handbook of Transport Studies, London: Sage. Forthcoming. Rodrigue, J-P, C. Comtois and B. Slack (2009) The Geography of Transport Systems, Second Edition, London: Routledge, 352 pages. ISBN: 9780415483247. Rodrigue, J-P, C. Comtois and B. Slack (2006) The Geography of Transport Systems, London: Routledge, 296 pages, ISBN: 0415354412. Rodrigue, J-P (2000) L'espace économique mondial: les économies avancées et la mondialisation, (The Global Economic Space : Advanced Economies and Globalization), Collection géographie contemporaine, Sainte Foy : Presses de l'Université du Québec, 534 pages. ISBN 2760510379. PricewaterhouseCoopers Best Business Book Award. Book Chapters (2012) "Commercial Goods Transport" in UN-HABITAT, 2013 Global Report on Human Settlements: Sustainable Urban Transport, United Nations Human Settlements Programme, London: Earthscan. In preparation. (2012) "Transport, Flows and Globalization", in J-P Rodrigue, T. Notteboom and J. Shaw (eds) The Sage Handbook of Transport Studies, London: Sage. In preparation. Rodrigue, J-P, B. Slack and C. Comtois (2012) "Green Supply Cha

elated Papers The future of residential parking in the Netherlands: the impact of increasing car ownership on the character of residential areas The role of parking standards in sustainable development Workplace parking levies: the Macbeth of the demand management world? Distribution and re-distribution in e-commerce Stochastic modals for the simulation of parking choices - a non network approach Making parking management an effective tool in travel planning

Impact of maximum parking standards including inward investment implications Offices moving down town - effects on travel behaviour Traffic Demand Management in Action Workplace parking levies: the Macbeth of the demand management world? "E-PARKING" - user-friendly e-commerce to optimise parking space The Management of City Centre Parking Traffic: Drivers' Information Needs and the Effectiveness of Parking Guidance and Information Systems

The high cost of free parking Donald C. Shoup, American Planning Association 17 Resenhas Planners Press, American Planning Association, 01/03/2005 - 734 páginas American drivers park for free on nearly ninety-nine percent of their car trips, and cities require developers to provide ample off-street parking for every new building. The resulting cost? Today we see sprawling cities that are better suited to cars than people and a nationwide fleet of motor vehicles that consume one-eighth of the world's total oil production. Donald Shoup contends in The High Cost of Free Parking that parking is sorely misunderstood and mismanaged by planners, architects, and politicians. He proposes new ways for cities to regulate parking so that Americans can stop paying for free parking's hidden costs.

The role of parking standards in sustainable development The CIVITAS initiative - strategies for sustainable urban transport "E-PARKING" - user-friendly e-commerce to optimise parking space Making parking management an effective tool in travel planning On-street parking - an opportunity for private finance Environmental management: the key to the alleviation of airport capacity