TO RESET OR NOT TO RESET … from Page 29
JVH responds: Hey, Charlie, small cities don’t have the flexibility that large cities do. I would think it was the opposite. OK, your parking revenues go into the General Fund. You know how much goes into the fund, and you also know how much is spent on infrastructure projects in your downtown area (where the money comes from). My guess is that you could put up a sign next to a new tree, or lightpost, or park bench that says something like, “Part of the money used to buy this bench came from the money you pay in parking fees.” Most likely you could do that almost instantly there. However, in a large city, the causing of that sign to be created would be a world-class bureaucratic headache. Just because the money goes into the General Fund doesn’t mean you can’t take credit for benefits that the area around the parking spaces receive.
••• Because We Can …
Dan Kupferman, Director of Car Park Management Systems at Walker Parking Consultants, joins in: Yes, we want to stop piggybacking for the money, which is a common practice. Many rent and lease agreements are non- transferable, as are most tickets to events. You can’t finish someone else’s meal at a restaurant (OK, now I’m reaching). The nice thing about multi-space is that the piggybacking
goes away automatically. Politicians can call it an unintended consequence. With single-space, you need to take the extra steps (and costs) of adding sensors, so you appear greedy – like the airlines charging for leg room and luggage. Why do they do it? The same reason we’ll reset the meters – because we can.
•••
But Is the Technology Reliable? Parking sensors are not very reliable. If they are magnetometer
Kevin Holliday of USC, former SFpark Project Administrator for the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency:
sensors, they could be thrown off by a large metal dumpster or double-parked garbage truck. So you could have some “resets” occurring for a whole variety of reasons other than the fact the driver moves her car. Let’s do some math. Assume that parking sensors are 99% reliable. They are not, but let’s give the sensor manufacturers the benefit of the doubt.
In a big city like LA, with 40k meters that, say, average three
sessions per day, you have 120k daily sessions. At a 1% error rate, you are talking about 1,200 parkers potentially exposed to tickets. Every day.
Now my numbers may be way off, and most cities have very
low capture rates, so the wrongful tickets ought to be low. But still. Talk about bad PR.
In the mind of Jane Q. Parker, reset policies tend to get
lumped together with market pricing for on-street parking. Both get seen as a ”bad” policy. SFpark explicitly eschewed a reset policy as a way to demonstrate to the public that the city was trying to apply market principles to on-street parking, rather than try to screw drivers.
Given Santa Monica’s decision to implement a reset policy, I think they will have a tougher time trying to implement market pricing down the road. And that is a real shame.
PT 30 Parking Today
www.parkingtoday.com
Morally Bankrupt?
From Brandy Stanley, Parking Services Manager for the City of Las Vegas
The argument that leftover time on a parking meter is the same as charging airline customers fees for “extra” services doesn’t seem like an accurate analogy to me. It seems like a manifestation of the entitlement attitude that everyone in our industry battles every single day.
Resetting the meters has absolutely no corollary to charging a customer for an additional service. We don’t offer additional services. We offer a parking space, period. We never made it a practice to clean everyone’s windshield for free and then all of a sudden started charging people for it. Resetting the meters realizes revenue from overselling real estate. We do it every day in parking garages and off- street facilities. We know that a monthly parker isn’t going to be in the facility 24/7. Oversell and our ability to recognize and manage it is in large part what keeps many of us employed. So how does applying that same principle to real estate on the street make us morally bankrupt? I’m confused, and perhaps someone can enlighten me.
JVH responds: Morally bankrupt? Wow! You have been in Vegas too
long, Brandy — I see no moral issues in resetting the meters. I wonder only at the policy issues and whether maximizing revenue for the sake of revenue and to meet a city budget shortfall is good policy. I would suggest that taking money from a small portion of the citizens (those who park on-street, for instance), and using it to, say, pay for the retirement program of the city’s employees is bad policy. If, however, the money went for things that the people paying the fee could use (sidewalks, lighting, trees, area parks), it would seem more reasonable, and the people paying would see the money they pay (even with meter resetting) as a reasonable value.
A Parking Buffet?
From Seamus Wilmot, Parking and Transportation Director at UC Berkeley If you allow parker B to piggyback on parker A’s unused time, are you also going to allow parker A to sell the unused time to parker B?
I am parker A. I am leaving my parking spot and have
one hour left on my meter. Parker B is waiting for my spot because there are no open spaces in the vicinity. [JVH,] using your logic of allowing parker B to have my time, I should also be allowed to sell my remaining hour to parker B for whatever he or she is willing to pay.
You are assuming the time on the meter belongs to parker A, and he or she is allowed to do with it what they want. Would this also hold true the next time I visit an all-you- can-eat buffet? Can I give my buffet plate to my friend after I have eaten? I didn’t have dessert, so there is still some “value” left on my buffet plate.
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