Bacon's Rebellion

Democracy Thrives in Sunlight

High-Tech Parking Enforcement

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by

James A. Bacon
in

The City of Fredericksburg is the first nation in the country to adopt AutoChalk, a high-tech system for enforcing parking violations.
AutoChalk’s technology records the exact location and identifying characteristics of each vehicle, including shape, color, size and GPS location as the patrol car drives by. The main benefit of the system, which costs $100,000 for a laptop, cameras, car and GPS capability, is labor savings. Writes Emily Battle with the Free Lance-Star:

The technology allows a parking officer to patrol downtown in a car instead of on foot. What officers now cover in an hour and a half could be covered in 20 minutes with the new technology.

Not everyone is enthralled. Three of the city’s seven council members voted against adopting the technology.

Let’s hope that Fredericksburg has a good experience with the application of GPS to parking. The next step, as I’ve blogged previously, is to use GPS to track cars without the necessity of any parking officers at all in a system that enables dynamic, time-of-day pricing.

(Photo credit: Tannery Creek Systems)

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20 responses to “High-Tech Parking Enforcement”

  1. Ray Hyde Avatar
    Ray Hyde

    Why is using GPS to track cars the next step?

  2. Jim Bacon Avatar
    Jim Bacon

    Because it’s totally automated — you don’t need a parking officer on the ground. Plus, as envisioned by Skymeter, it potentially allows dynamic, time-of-day pricing for parking.

  3. Larry Gross Avatar
    Larry Gross

    well.. you need GPS and RFID, wouldn’t you?

    Basically you need a way to determine the position of a vehicle and a way to transmit/receive information about that vehicle and it’s owner.

    This technology already exists.

    GM has been advertising for years the ability of it’s OnStar to communicate to a central location the location of a vehicle as well as other info about the vehicle.

    Trucking and delivery companies do this now.

    Have you ever checked the UPS tracking number for something you bought – ONLINE – a few minutes after it was delivered?

    YUP – that little scanner that the UPS guy scans your package with – almost instantly transmits it back to the UPS website.

    The next time you have a visit from SEARS, check out his van – which has a GPS and comm unit on it.

    SEARs not only knows exactly where that vehicle is – they know how long it is has been there – indeed they have a an entire track record of it.

    Further – I purchased additional service from the SEARs repair guy while he sat in his truck and keyed in my billing info on a laptop – in realtime to SEARs central computers.

    My point?

    All of this stuff exists right now and is actually a proven technology that works.

    More important – the business world has absolutely no qualms about using a technology to improve their operations and service.

    The continuing dialogue is about the merits of using this technology to institute pricing for parking and roads.

    Some I feel is foolish given the state of the art of our abilities to do this.

    Questions about the efficacy of Technology is often given as a reason why we cannot do this when nothing could be further from the truth. The technology is here NOW.

    In this case – the real issue – is instead – do we want to use an existing and proven technology to charge for parking and roads?

    It’s a no brainer.

    Imagine perfectly sane people breaking their necks to spend a nickel or a quarter to avoid a $10 fine.

    Do you think those same folks would willing pay a reasonable fee automatically for as long as they needed to park?

    So.. we have a technology that would enable this…and people would, I think, welcome it as a convenience and worthwhile service.

  4. rodger provo Avatar
    rodger provo

    Jim-

    Fredericksburg’s administration sold the $100,000 investment by their taxpayers to acquire this system as a means to better manage:

    -student parking around the UMW,
    -commuter parking around the
    train station downtown
    -and downtown employee parking on city street streets to free
    spaces for visitors.

    They did not ask the university
    to pick up part of this expense
    nor are the surrounding counties
    whose commuters are creating like
    problems downtown helping with this
    costly investment.

    We have spents millions in our city
    to build an attractive garage in
    the historic district and on the
    university campus that are not being utilized.

    This system has been bought to try
    to force motorists to use these
    garages paid for by our taxpayers.

    The town has little support for this system. People here enjoy
    the “small town charm” of our
    little place. They think this thing does not belong in a small
    historic downtown.

    Having this system, as one council
    member said Tuesday night, is like
    using a hammer on a problem not
    needing such dramatic actions.

    He also said the purchase of the
    system by the city would generate
    negative publicity about the bad
    parking problems and the dramatic steps the city has taken to solve this so-called problem in our “burg.”

    You are the first to step up to give Fredericksburg publicity it
    does not need.

    Cheers!!!!!

  5. Jim Bacon Avatar
    Jim Bacon

    Rodger, my mom lives in downtown Fredericksburg (Caroline Street) and I visit with some regularity. But she doesn’t keep up with local controversies, so it’s good to get the background. I had no idea the parking issues were so heated.

    Regardless of whether City Council’s parking policy is good or bad, it still makes sense to administer that policy as cost effectively as possible. As long as the investment generates a reasonable return to the taxpayers, AutoChalk is a good idea.

  6. rodger provo Avatar
    rodger provo

    Jim, we spent nearly $7 million to
    build an elegant, historically
    appropriate garage downtown. UMW
    also has built a major garage.

    I submit to you we have parking management problem that the city’s
    taxpayers should receive some help
    from the downtown merchants-real
    estate owners, surrounding counties
    and the university in resolving.

    We have not had such help – thus the taxpayers who paid for those garages are now having to pay for this system to try to get motorists to use those
    expensive facilities.

  7. Jim Bacon Avatar
    Jim Bacon

    Rodger, one tool to coax people into those expensive garages would be an intelligent pricing policy for parking. I don’t know how much of the downtown parking is metered, or what the rates are, but it the parking spaces are free or otherwise under-priced, of course people will park there instead of in the garages. But parking is not “free”. There’s always a cost, even if an opportunity cost. If nothing else, parking lanes could be converted into traffic lanes. People need to know that if parking is not free, they need to pay.

    One possible strategy, typically of importance to local merchants, is to reserve on-street parking for short-term parking — say, 30 minutes — in order to encourage quick turnover. Allow shoppers to park cheaply for the first 30 minutes, then really crank up the charge after that to incentivize them to conduct their business and then move on. (That’s the beauty of dynamic pricing.) For those whose business requires more than 30 minutes, the proper pricing policies will encourage them to use the garages.

  8. Ray Hyde Avatar
    Ray Hyde

    “it still makes sense to administer that policy as cost effectively as possible. As long as the investment generates a reasonable return to the taxpayers, AutoChalk is a good idea.”

    Right. I asked why this was the next step, not how it would be done.

    So, the next logical question is this: What is the basis for thirty minute parking with respect to return to the taxpayers?

    The taxpayers are already getting (and shelling out) sales tax on their purchases. Isn’t the parking fee just another sales tax on top of the first one? How is having the taxpayers shell out $100,000 in order to have themselves harrassed a good return?

    How do we know that the best bang for the buck isn’t to ignore the situation? It takes only a small amount of enforcement to get most people to pay.

    Suppose we had fully automated and therefore 100% enforcement. It wouldn’t take long before you had 100% compliance and zero revenue. Then where is the return?

    Suppose I’m elderly and don’t walk so fast. Why should I pay more for the same shopping?

    How do we know that quick turnover doesn’t aggravate our congestion problems?

    Just because something is new and gee whiz doesn’t mean it leads to a better result. In this case, it means that an aggravating parking shortage will become an expensive and aggravating parking shortage.

    “parking is not “free”. There’s always a cost, even if an opportunity cost. If nothing else, parking lanes could be converted into traffic lanes. People need to know that if parking is not free, they need to pay.”

    Now you are onto something. And it isn’t just parking. Maybe the planners should think about that.

  9. Jim Bacon Avatar
    Jim Bacon

    Ray, downtown merchants have wrestled with the issue of paid parking, on streets and off, for nearly 100 years — ever since the advent of the automobile. As documented in “Lots of Parking: Land Use in an Automobile Culture,” the concept of charging for on-street parking has been widely accepted for decades. The question now is this: Does new technology make it practicable to administer paid on-street parking in new ways? The answer is yes.

    Instead of making someone feed $.75 into a meter for a half hour, and then ticket him if he doesn’t leave, it’s now possible to bill him $.75 electronically for the first half hour. And instead of ticketing him $45 if he runs over five minutes, you can simply up the charge to $2, $3, $4 or whatever an hour. That incentivizes him to leave but does not punish him disproportionately for a minor infraction. GPS technology allows much more flexibility and creativity in how parking is priced and administered.

  10. rodger provo Avatar
    rodger provo

    Jim, though your comments are well
    intended, I would suggest that our
    little town’s case does not related to your last comments.

    We have no parking meters. We have
    free parking on surface lots. The
    only paid parking in our downtown
    is in our $7 million garage.

    No retail center in the region levies parking fees.

    Parking issues in Fredericksburg
    are generated by commuters from
    nearby counties who use our
    train station and UMW students who
    park on residential streets, even
    though the university has built a
    well lit, safe garage.

    Over the last 30 years the city
    encouraged the creation of many
    apartments and condos around the
    historic district, many of which
    do offer off-street parking.

    Visitors to Fredericksburg love our
    cute, quaint little downtown. The
    addition of “robo-cop,” as we are
    calling it, does little for the
    charm our historic district.

  11. Ray Hyde Avatar
    Ray Hyde

    “And instead of ticketing him $45 if he runs over five minutes, you can simply up the charge to $2, $3, $4 or whatever an hour.”

    If that is the way it works out, fine. I’m sceptical though. What incentive does the town have to do as you suggest when they just paid $100 grand in order to be able to collect the $45?

    “When my students and I studied cruising for parking in a 15-block business district in Los Angeles, we found the average cruising time was 3.3 minutes, and the average cruising distance half a mile (about 2.5 times around the block). This may not sound like much, but with 470 parking meters in the district, and a turnover rate for curb parking of 17 cars per space per day, 8,000 cars park at the curb each weekday. Even a small amount of cruising time for each car adds up to a lot of traffic.

    Over the course of a year, the search for curb parking in this 15-block district created about 950,000 excess vehicle miles of travel — equivalent to 38 trips around the earth, or four trips to the moon. And here’s another inconvenient truth about underpriced curb parking: cruising those 950,000 miles wastes 47,000 gallons of gas and produces 730 tons of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. If all this happens in one small business district, imagine the cumulative effect of all cruising in the United States.”

    from today’s OP-Ed in the New York Times.

    If this is right, then your suggestion would reduce a lot of vehicle miles traveled. It might reduce merchant revenue, too. My real question is, does anybody really know what the right balance is?

  12. Larry Gross Avatar
    Larry Gross

    I think I’ve got the answer.

    How about the violators get in the mail the usual fine or the fine is forgiven if they spend the amount of the fine on parking in the parking garage in the future?

    🙂

    on the second violation – increase the fine – but the same deal – pay the fine or use the garage

    etc, etc

  13. Ray Hyde Avatar
    Ray Hyde

    Larry:

    Sometimes, I like the way you think.
    That is really brilliant.

    Nonjudgemental, same amount of cash. What’s not to like?

  14. rodger provo Avatar
    rodger provo

    Jim, Larry, Ray and Others –

    You have this issue distorted and
    out of focus.

    Fredericksburg should not have
    built a $7 million garage in the historic district using funds provided by the locally collected fuel taxes and much needed parking fees to pay off the debt for this now poorly utilized structure.

    UMW probably financed their garage
    with bonds, using student fees to
    pay off that debt.

    Now the city is going to spend
    $100,000 on this “robo-cop” to
    try to get downtown patrons and
    university students and staff to
    park in these garages by hitting
    hard with more tickets.

    Gee, I thought Jim, you were the
    anti-government, anti-tax scribe
    for Virginia. You, Larry and others on this site hit the big
    government spending hard — have
    you guys lost your focus!!!!

  15. Jim Bacon Avatar
    Jim Bacon

    Rodger, There are two levels to the discussion going on. In the first level, you are irate about the waste of taxpayer (and student) dollars built for parking structures. I quite agree, if there is sufficient demand for parking structures, let the private sector respond. History has demonstrated in hundreds of cities around the U.S. that the private sector is perfectly willing and able to meet the supply of parking, either with parking lots or parking garages.

    In the other level of debate, we take the parking structures as a given. They’re there now. We’re not going to tear them down. How do we fill them up? And we’re exploring the tool of dynamic pricing for on-street parking as a possible part of the solution.

    Ray, that is interesting research cited by the NYT. In answer to your question — how does anyone know what the proper balance is? — the answer is, you don’t know when you start. But you make your best guess, and you see how people respond to the prices you set. You keep on tinkering with the parking prices until you get it right.

  16. Larry Gross Avatar
    Larry Gross

    re: “You, Larry and others on this site hit the big
    government spending hard — have
    you guys lost your focus!!!!”

    I had actually started a negative response to why the city spent 7 million dollars on something without doing a little investigation as to projected use and more to the point – if the parking garage was supposed to be part of a plan with respect to parking …where is the rest of the plan?

    Is the rest of the plan – to figure out how to better nail the folks that are using the streets to convince them to not use the streets?

    That’s why I put the comment about letting folks choose between a fine or using the garage.

    In other words – find a way to give people something they want in exchange for changing their behavior that is considered undesireable.

    Is this the job of government?

    Well – if the government desides to get into the business of providing public parking – then yes.

    Otherwise – turn this over to a private party as a concession and let the private sector devise a market-based solution.

    So I ask Rodger – this question

    What if the situation in Fredericksburg was exactly the same except that the parking garage and the high tech parking system were part of a private business concession that the city had contracted with to deal with the overall parking issue?

    Would you favor that approach?

  17. Jim Wamsley Avatar
    Jim Wamsley

    Thank you, Larry.

    “What if the situation in Fredericksburg was exactly the same except that the parking garage and the high tech parking system were part of a private business concession that the city had contracted with to deal with the overall parking issue?

    Would you favor that approach?”

    Many of the comments about government activates remind me of the story about the investor who followed a policy of managing his stock portfolio by picking 10 stocks and investing an equal amount of money in each. Next, each quarter he rebalanced the portfolio by dividing the value of the portfolio by 10 and selling off enough of those that increased and investing more in those that decreased. Other investors follow a policy of selling losers and replacing them with winners.

    Much of the discussion has revolved around government investment policy. I am on the side of investing where the return is highest. Others champion what I call the “peanut butter” approach. Spread the investment evenly over the countryside. Ignore the number of citizens or the economic benefits.

    The economic advantage to managing parking so that 15% of the spaces are available to new parkers should be obvious to all but the doctrine or math challenged. Using parking enforcement tools and, as Jim said “keep on tinkering with the parking prices until you get it right.”

    Individuals that challenge free market doctrine should expect to be challenged in return.

  18. rodger provo Avatar
    rodger provo

    The Fredericksburg and UMW garages
    are to large and/or not at locations that will attract users.

    The downtown garage is at one of
    the historic district.

    The UMW garage is at one end of the
    campus.

    Williamsburg smartly built a garage
    near the center of their downtown
    that works.

    Stauton did the same thing.

    Cheers!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  19. Larry Gross Avatar
    Larry Gross

    A letter to the editor in the Free Lance Star this morning pointed out that tourists used to be given a complimentary park free pass to put on their dashboards. The same letter pointed out that handicaped folks should also be exempted.

    and to make things clear – there are no parking meters on the streets – but instead a two-hour limit – and previous enforcement consisted of a foot patrol person putting chalk marks on tires, recording the time then checking back after two hours.

    These situations were handled by the foot patroller who would look on the dash BEFORE they wrote the ticket.

    Now what are you going to do?

    How did this get overlooked by all the city people… working on this – and then have it pointed out by someone outside of the process?

    “fixing” this .. will cost the city time and money to pay someone to intercept tickets that should not go out…..

    I think what the city did – was to replace a manual process with a high-tech fix without first revisiting the ideas and why’s behind the policy to start with.

    Someone needed to be asking WHO is this “service” for (the service of providing on-street parking) – and who it is not for (who is abusing it).

    THEN go forward with a written policy – FIRST.

    This is why I favor having a private/market approach – and that is because the first thing the private contractor would want BEFORE they went forward would be a written policy.

    Then when the contractor made a proposal – it’s high-tech validity would be verified with respect to how it accomplished the written policy.

    there might have been good intentions for adopting high tech but as so often is the case with computerization

    … if the basic policy that gets computerized is flawed – then what you get is not a solution but a high-tech version of a flawed policy.

    .. and my .. long-winded point?

    any localitiy whether it be Fredericksburg or Tysons needs to be thinking about parking from a much more holitically view than reacting to a “lack of places to park”.

  20. Ray Hyde Avatar
    Ray Hyde

    “Many of the comments about government activates remind me of the story about the investor who followed a policy of managing his stock portfolio by picking 10 stocks and investing an equal amount of money in each. Next, each quarter he rebalanced the portfolio by dividing the value of the portfolio by 10 and selling off enough of those that increased and investing more in those that decreased. Other investors follow a policy of selling losers and replacing them with winners. “

    I’m not sure I understand the reason for this comment, but i t happens I have some insight on this.

    In 2000, right before the crash, I invested $25,000 in two accounts. Each account invested an equal amount of money in 50 different stocks.

    One account adopted a “buy and hold” strategy. The other account adopeted the strategy described: Divide the value of the portfolio buy the number of stocks, and rebalance the stocks accordingly. Inother words, continue to hold the original stocks, but sell high and buy low.

    After the considerable fall in socks following the tech crash and the recent rise, the results are as follows: “Buy and hold” $24,188.

    Rebalance: $41,238.

    Admittedly, this says nothing about the policy of selling losers and replacing them with winners. But, I do not know how to test that. How do you know if you have replaced them with winners, a priori?

    The only difference is selecting the choices up front, and then choosing the winners and losers among them. If you own coke and pepsi and one goes down and the other up, you sell the winner and buy the loser. When the situation changes, you change teams, but you still root for both.

    It is a nice idea to invest where the return is highest, but it seems to me that you must first pick a group to choose from, otherwise you are shooting always at the next duck.

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