The future of parking
PARKING. It is always one of the first things people run out of come Christmas season, along with patience and funds. On a regular day, finding a parking slot in the metro is already challenging. But during the holidays, it becomes a nearly impossible task.
A 2017 study by the Boston Consulting Group found that Filipinos spend 24 minutes a day just looking for parking. If you add to that the 16 days a year we spend stuck in traffic, which is partly caused by drivers going around looking for parking, that would mean we are trapped in our vehicles an average of 22 days a year. You could binge watch all seven seasons of Game of Thrones eight times over in that amount of time.
Thankfully, new technologies and business models are reshaping the mobility ecosystem and, in some way, addressing the pain points of the parking experience.
One of the trends experts believe will have a significant impact on the parking industry is pay- per- use mobility. Ride- hailing services, for example, are already prompting users – particularly the younger ones – to rethink their plans of buying their own vehicles. A Deloitte study found that half of USbased ride- hailing users say the service has caused them to question their need to own a car in the future. Considering that the parking industry relies on the widespread use of private vehicles, this trend could significantly drive down the demand for parking.
Some design firms are already planning for this scenario by conceptualizing flexible facilities that enable multifunctional use. An off- street multilevel parking facility with flat floors and one- way ramps, for example, is easier to retrofit compared to one with sloping or staggered floors. Ultimately, it’s a major consideration for real estate developers and parking operators: spend more today on constructing a flexible space or risk having an underutilized facility in the future.
In the meantime, data analytics and telematics can facilitate the matching of vehicles with parking spots and optimize utilization. Audi turned to this technology to better manage the parking facility in its factory in Ingolstadt, Germany, which houses more than 40,000 employees but has a parking lot of only more than 5,000 spaces. The car manufacturer hired Urbiotica, a Spanish company specializing in wireless sensor networks, to install a parking solution that can detect vehicles entering and leaving each parking sector, calculate occupancy data, and communicate real- time availability to drivers so they know exactly where the free spaces are.
The city of Jacksonville, Florida has a similar system. Street sensors are connected to mobile apps that drivers can install to find available on- street parking spaces in real time. The app can also point them to the locations of parking garages and lots. It’s a system that could go a long way towards reducing road rage in many of our central business districts.
Another parking pain point that could be easing is payments and pricing. There are parking facilities that already allow mobile payments, eliminating long qeues that build up at exit gates. In San Francisco, the transportation office went a step further and implemented a demand- responsive pricing program. Parking sensors installed for on- street parking detect available space. Drivers can check online for these available spaces near their destination. As vehicles fill up the spaces in a particular block, the parking fee goes up in that area, while the parking fee in areas with several open spaces goes down.
An evaluation of the pilot phase found that average parking rates were lowered, drivers had an easier time finding available spaces, and, most importantly, greenhouse gas emissions decreased. Late last year, San Francisco became the first US city to implement a demandresponsive pricing on all its on- street parking meters and the surface parking lots operated by the city’s transportation agency.
One of the taglines of San Francisco’s project is, “Circle less, live more.” It’s a selling point we can all get behind because most, if not all, of us know what it feels like to have our plans messed up just because of a lack of parking space. Working towards a smart parking environment is one way to escape being hostage to the parking situation. And as November quickly turns into December, the solutions can’t come soon enough.