The cost of parking yet again

The price of a parking ticket has made the news again. Adelaide Now has an article about parking fees in the CBD rising.

With no evidence at all, the article begins by saying "Rising city parking costs sting retailers". Although I have looked hard, I have not been able to find a study that has actually measured theh effect on retail spending of car parking fees.

One of the problems with the article is that it is confusing two things. It says:

Flinders St UPark users are among the worst hit, with hourly rates almost doubling since last year. A five-hour weekday park will cost commuters $25, compared with $13 previously. Weekend street parks also jumped from 30c to $1 when the Council reviewed its fees last month.

The $25 weekday cost for commuters is irrelevant to city retailers. That is the cost for people parking their car and going to work. The question is what casual visitors have to pay. That is shown in the next sentence. Most shopping is done at the weekend and we are told that on street parking fees have jumped (a massive) 30c to $1. How does that break the bank and damage retailers' business?

The council spokesperson who is quoted is dead right. Adelaide's parking costs are some of the cheapest in the country. Not only that, we have a huge number of inner city car parks compared say to Perth. When I was there recently, I did not see any evidence that it had damaged business. I am not sure parking could actually get much cheaper in Adelaide.

The article goes on to say:

Rundle Mall Management Authority chair Theo Maras said it was up to Adelaide City Council to provide affordable parking for people who were visiting or working in the city.

Well, no it isn't. It is up to Adelaide City Council to provide the an environment for the best transport options for everybody, taking into account individual benefits and the wider cost that is born by everybody. Providng "affordable" parking amounts to a subsidy. There's plenty of that already for motorists. We do not need more.

A space the size of the largest room in your house to store your car for only $

Borrowed from here

While we're talking about parking

When I have work to do, I very much enjoy procrastinating and finding interesting ways of putting it off. One of the best tools of this is Google Streetview. You can go on to the street in any city that has had a Google mobile drive through it. All of Australia is covered along with all of North America and a large chunk of Europe, Singapore, Japan and a whole bunch of other places.

I was checking out the design of some new suburbs in Denmark the other day and after crossing a bridge, came across a large shopping centre called Fisketorvet. This is the view from across the bridge:

Borrowed from here

And this is its entrance:

Borrowed from here

As you would expect for a shopping centre of its size, it offers 2000 car parks. The first three hours are free. If you go to the cinema inside the complex, they will give you a free parking permit at the ticket office.

What is great is that bikes are not forgotten. The entrance is a u-shaped driveway that allows cars to come in and drop people off or pick them up. A wide bike path goes the who way around and then leads to separate, raised lanes over the bridge.

The bike path leads to a bike park with space for 600 bikes. It is difficult to find a picture so here is the Google Streetview image:

View Larger Map

This is what choice looks like. How hard would it be to make this mandatory for new shopping centres and large shops? It would add nothing to the cost and its benefit is that it recognises the number of people who do arrive at these places using a transport method other than the car - or who would if they actually had a choice.

Hospital parking

While English yoof are fire bombing cars and looting shops for sneakers and iPads, protests in Adelaide are a little more sedate. Recently, a group of people quietly protested the introduction of car parking fees at public hospitals. It was reported on the Adelaide Now website and in the Messenger Press.

I have my own views about free parking. It does not exist. Somebody pays for it, even if it is society generally because they lose out on a piece of land that could be used for something else. For example, some of the really big car parks we see around big Bunnings stores could be child care centres or schools.

Part of the problem is that, other things being equal, the lower the cost of something, the greater the demand (where cost is not just money but time and inconvenience). I would recommend the paper on free parking and minimum parking requirements that Donal Shoup wrote. The low price leads inevitably to unlimited demand so that it does not matter how much parking you provide, it is never enough.

Occasionally a suggestion is made to charge for parking in suburban shopping centres such as Westfield at Marion. It inevitably leads to howls of indignation. I have been to Marion a few times and depending on the time of day you can spend a very long time driving around trying to find a car park. Charging for them is one way of rationing a limited resource. Often at those car parks, the best positions are taken up by shop owners. I had my hair cut recently and the hairdresser was pleased to be able to point out his new car parked on the street right in front of his shop. That kind of defeats the argument that car parking spaces in front of a business are necessary for business.

Nevertheless, you can understand people's dismay. A lot of people using the car parks are staff, many of whom work at night, and people visiting patients. The cost as I understand it will be about $13 a day. I do not know what the proposed hourly rate is.

Unlike with going to the shops, generally people do not choose to go to hospital. Either they are sick themselves or they are visiting someone they know who is sick. Charging for the privilege does seem a little questionable. I am all for measures to change behaviour and encourage alternatives to the car but you would have thought somewhere other than a hospital would be the place to start. Shopping centre car parks would be far more effective.

Free parking at all hospitals may not be the answer but you would think something fair could be organised. As usual, David Hembrow has written a great blog post on this subject. A good suggestion is in one of the comments below the post. In the writer's city (a Dutch city), at the hospital, anyone can drive in and use the car park. To get out you need a token. Depending on the purpose of your visit, you are either given a token or you pay for one. Patients and their family members are obvious candidates as are doctors and nurses working a night shift.

In addition to a system like that, of course a decent public transport system (with priority for buses and a regular service every day) and a proper segregated bicycle network that leads to places like hospitals would also help so that visitors and staff have a genuine alternative.

Charging people without any alternative really does defeat the object.

I couldn't have said it better myself

Many blogs you visit have links to the blogs of other like-minded people. It is interesting to visit those when you have a spare minute. Often they become another favourite blog. That's certainly what has happened to me over time.

The problem with it though is that you come across people who write so much better than you do and articulate your thoughts more eruditely than you could hope to.

Rather than paraphrasing what they say, it is better I think simply to quote them directly.

There are two recent blog posts that are I think required reading for anyone interested in making their city less hostile to people getting around on foot and by bike.

The first is written by David Hembrow (his top ten status shows that many, many people are familiar with his blog). It summarises the history of cycling in the Netherlands and the UK and what made them diverge so far to the point that the UK's modal share for cyclists is as low as the woeful share in Australia. The paragraphs about children using bikes and the provision of parking at supermarkets and railway stations are particularly eye-opening.

The second is on the Vole O'Speed blog. To me, it hits the nail on the head. In short, very few people use bikes for every day transport in places like Australia because it is dangerous. It is true that statistically, and using travel per hour as a measure, it is really not much more dangerous than driving. However, as the author says:

the cyclists on our roads now are an unrepresentative, self-selected group. Measuring their casualty rate per mile does not measure the true danger of cycling, it measures the risks to a group who are peculiarly able to mitigate the risks of cycling in fast motorised traffic  though their speed, athleticism, confidence and assertiveness.

That groups consists in the main of men riding sport bikes.

The best quote is this:

It is, simply, objectively dangerous to have metal boxes weighing up to several tons moving at speeds from 20 to 70 mph in the same space as unenclosed human beings.

The logic of that statement is unassailable. If we want to reduce the number of trips made by car (and there are, as we know, many reasons why that is a worthwhile goal), it is first necessary to reduce the danger to which anyone on a bike is exposed. It is not done by helmet laws, educating motorists, pleading with cyclists to obey the road rules to earn respoect, nor any of the many other things that have been tried and failed.

It is done by separating the person from the source of the danger.

An excuse to talk about trains again

A couple of recent articles on the ABC News website and on Adelaide Now refer to a study about building a high-speed railway line linking Brisbane, Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne.

It's a great idea (any new railway line is) but I confess I am confused by the figures.

It is estimated to cost between $61 and $108 billion. That is a very large wad of cash. After that, it gets interesting. Adelaide Now says:

A one-way trip from Melbourne to Sydney could be as cheap as $99, while the fare from Brisbane to Sydney could be as low as $75.

Brisbane to Sydney is about 900 km. Give or take 10 or 20 kms, that's about the distance from Hamburg to Zurich. You can catch a German ICE that distance and it will take you 8 hours exactly. You can catch one at 10.01am from Hamburg HBF and it will drop you off in Zurich at exactly 6pm. According to the DB website, it will cost you 152,40 EUR (that's $204.25 is today's money). So not quite as low as $75.

If the train runs, the question is where it will serve in between. You can imagine it stopping at Newcastle, Port Macquarie, Coffs Harbour and the Gold Coast. By way of comparison, the German equivalent serves large cities like Hannover, Frankfurt, Mannheim, Karlsruhe, Freiburg and Basel in between. That I think would tend to make the service a bit more viable. True it is that Sydney has a larger population than most European cities but not all of them are travelling to Brisbane on any given day.

If they do, these days they take the plane. Over that distance, the train would have to be very fast to compete. It has the benefit of picking people up and dropping them off in the centre of the city but that only really benefits people who either live there or have their hotel/conference/meeting there. It takes people time to get to the airport to catch a plane but it would equally take time to get to the centre of a city to catch the train. If you like in Blacktown, you can safely add an hour to your journey to reach central station before getting on the train for Brisbane.

Not only that, the planes travelling between Australia's capital cities are not exactly overflowing. Until recently, whenever I have travelled interstat by plane, it is on a Boeing 767 or similar that has three seats each side of a central aisle. More recently, I have been on slightly larger planes with a 2-3-2 configuration. If a railway line were built, I can see airlines making its life very difficult. We have seen price wars in the past. In fact, even without a price war I reckon in real terms it's cheaper to fly places than it has every been.

If the Commonwealth can find between $61 and $108 billion, rather than spend it on a single railway line connecting only some capital cities, I cannot helping thinking that the money would be better spent on some desparately overdue projects inside our cities. Sydney is finally getting its Epping rail link that has been talked about for decades. Its metro was canned before it was begun (a stupid and short-sighted decision). Compare that with Copenhagen - a city with a fraction of the population. Not only does it already have a metro (on which the Sydney one would have been based) in addition to its S-Tog, a circular extension is already being built.

Commonwealth money would extend our railway line north east to the new suburbs around Gawler and further south than Seaford where it is needed. It could also extend it further east to Mount Barker and beyond where, judging by today's newspaper, it is so desparately needed. We also still do not have a tram or railway line to the airport. That would be a far better use of all of that money.

Urban images

I picked up a coffee from Cibo's the other day. They like to emphasise their Italian heritage. I could see it in the picture of two ridiculously good-looking people riding on a vespa without helmets that was up on the wall.

There was also an interesting picture above the counter. I tried to take a picture of it but because it was so glossy, all you could see was the reflection of what was behind the picture so I have to describe it.

It was a cartoon picture of a Cibo cafe. It was not like a usual Cibo cafe which is either on the ground floor of a modern office building or in a concrete shopping centre surrounded by car park (to be fair, there are some exceptions like the one on Prospect Road). Instead it was on the ground floor of a funky looking two storey old building. Outside the Cibo in the picture is a little table with an umbrella. At the table sit two groovy looking and smiling people. At the counter is a man in his Cibo shorts and t-shirt and his cycling cap - no helmet of course - standing next to his bike while ordering from the smiling Barista (Bean Bar does the same thing. The store on Gouger Street has a picture of a happy pair of teenagers riding their tandem bike across some sand-dunes). It's all very happy and fashionable although quite distant from real life.

I find it's a bit like children's books. A good example is the Magic Hat by Mem Fox. Here's a page:

Have a look at the street. There are no cars, children are walking around with their families, the playground is close by and facing the houses. People rarely have to wait for traffic and if they do, it's usually a single brightly coloured convertible driven by a friendly bunny rabbit. It's very different from real life. In real life, this street would have plenty of on-street car parking and driveways every few metres. It is doubtful whether the playground would be there at all. The business on the corner would have a big sign saying "Free Parking" with an arrow pointing to the rear of the property.

In my experience, this is the case with many children's books. Towns and villages are happy and safe places, lots of people are on the street and cars are few and far between. Sesame Street is like it too.

One exception that I have come across is a book called the Tiger Who Came to Tea. In summary, a hungry tiger knocks at the door of a house where a girl and her mother are. It is hungry and so they give it some food. It stays hungry and ends up eating all of their food. Dad comes home to an empty pantry and so they go out for tea. The moral of the story is to ensure you have tiger food in your pantry. Anyway, as the family is walking to the cafe, they walk aong a road that looks a bit like England in the 1970s, which it probably is (regrettably, I can no longer find the book so cannot scan a picture of it). Nevertheless, parking is limited to what is on the street, the pavements are wide and there are interesting shop fronts to see. Also, judging by the book, the High Street is close enough for a family to walk to safely even though they are hungry because a tiger ate all their food.

Alas, real life is not always like that. It can be if you live in the right suburb but we don't seem to build suburbs good enough for children's books any more. It would be a great test. Instead of council rules and urban planning manuals, I think we should just have a read of a book like the Magic Hat before we build a suburb. Build that and you will be well on your way to a very friendly place.

Except for the giant scary man who appears at the end.

Update: 16 May 2015

I found the picture from the tiger book:

 

Car stickers

When a car driver speeds past you leaving a space of only 6 inches, one of the benefits is that you get a good close view of their car stickers. Car stickers are good because they are a way of telling the outside world about the kind of person you are while you're stuck behind all that glass and steel.

For instance, your car sticker might tell the world that you're carbon neutral because some shrubs get planted each time you buy a new car. Some stickers tell politicians who might be stuck behind you at the traffic lights that you can do two things at the same time - fish and vote.

I saw a couple on a Commodore recently. One said simply, "Drive it as if you stole it". Sensible advice indeed.

The second sticker advocated, in a few words, open speed limits everywhere. It's all about freedom you see. A person in a car should enjoy the freedom to drive where they like, when they like and how they like. Any intrusion on that is a breach of a fundamental human right. After all, motorists pay billions of dollars every year in registration and petrol tax.

My all time favourite is one I saw a couple of months ago. It said:

Bring me coffee and nobody gets hurt.

Absolutely hilarious. It's as good as those signs you can put on your desk that say, "you don't have to be mad to work here but it helps". I nearly fell off my bike from laughing so much. In fact, it makes me giggle just writing it.