Welcome Guest! In order to take advantage of all the great features that Waterloo Region Connected has to offer, including participating in the lively discussions below, you're going to have to register. The good news is that it'll take less than a minute and you can get started enjoying Waterloo Region's best online community right away. Login or Create an Account
European cities of all sizes have extremely accurate and widespread information about parking availability. When you enter a small French (for example) city’s centre by car, it’s routine to see directional signs pointing to its two or three main parking garages, and a green number indicating the number of spots in each (if there are spots available). A driver can quickly choose to head for the garage or lot with more spots available (and avoid lots with no spots available), confident that he will find a place to park when he gets there.
If they can do it, we can do it here, too, and I think parking information is a great suggestion. I haven’t heard how expensive it is, but since it’s so common elsewhere it must not be prohibitively so.
(02-12-2016, 10:21 AM)MidTowner Wrote: European cities of all sizes have extremely accurate and widespread information about parking availability. When you enter a small French (for example) city’s centre by car, it’s routine to see directional signs pointing to its two or three main parking garages, and a green number indicating the number of spots in each (if there are spots available). A driver can quickly choose to head for the garage or lot with more spots available (and avoid lots with no spots available), confident that he will find a place to park when he gets there.
If they can do it, we can do it here, too, and I think parking information is a great suggestion. I haven’t heard how expensive it is, but since it’s so common elsewhere it must not be prohibitively so.
Parking spot availability is a relatively inexpensive thing to add... to parking garages. The incremental cost is small, when you're already spending 5~10K per spot.
That European town has only had to invest in 3 garages, which provide convenient, but not free, parking.
Uptown, on the other hand, has most of its parking in surface lots. Nearly a dozen or so different lots. These are cheap, and adding counters is likely to cost as much as the parking did in the first place. Not to mention that with the added capital expense, you disincentivise any use of the land that isn't parking.
Parking has to go one of two ways if you don't want chaos: Dumb, plentiful, and free; or smart and expensive. And if Uptown wants to continue to grow, they're going to have to give up on the dream of the first.
02-12-2016, 11:43 AM (This post was last modified: 02-12-2016, 11:45 AM by MidTowner.)
Oh, right, I was forgetting that the people making use of this land and infrastructure want someone else to pay for it for them. Sorry about that.
If we’re talking about free parking, well, you’re getting great value no matter how long it takes you to find a spot or what a headache it is getting in and out of it.
I actually do dispute that parking counting is expensive even as a proportion of the cost of a simple paved surface lot. In the case of the various surface lots, you need a simple counter at the entrance to each to count the instances of a car entering the lot or leaving the lot. It’s not necessary to have a sensor in each space. The system itself might be expensive, but I bet the hardware to feed into it from the garage and a few of the surface lots would be cheap. I've been at pretty rinky-dink surface lots where the bar won't lift because the counter has detected too many entries and is waiting to detect a car leaving.
And the system probably could not be considered expensive if it avoids the cost of a new $10 million parking garage…
(02-12-2016, 10:21 AM)MidTowner Wrote: European cities of all sizes have extremely accurate and widespread information about parking availability. When you enter a small French (for example) city’s centre by car, it’s routine to see directional signs pointing to its two or three main parking garages, and a green number indicating the number of spots in each (if there are spots available). A driver can quickly choose to head for the garage or lot with more spots available (and avoid lots with no spots available), confident that he will find a place to park when he gets there.
The YYZ Terminal 1 parking garage has this signage on each level, too, for indicating the number of available spots on that level. However, the signs have never been turned on, more than a year after they were installed ...
If they were simple, like a single access point that could be gate controlled, it'd still be 15-50K for the one pair, but at least it could be moved should the lot setup change. The pinnacle we don't need is the GO parking garage, where signs tell you the number of spots on each level, and lights visible as you are at the end of a row show you which spots are full and which are free....and this is all paid for with public realm funds. I'd be really disappointed if Miovision couldn't have a single camera over an entrance detecting cars going in and out, rather than a gate system.
(02-12-2016, 11:44 AM)tomh009 Wrote: The YYZ Terminal 1 parking garage has this signage on each level, too, for indicating the number of available spots on that level. However, the signs have never been turned on, more than a year after they were installed ...
Are you sure about that? It's been a couple of years since I parked in the T1 lot (I park at Viscount and ride the LINK Train now), but I'm absolutely positive they were working.
(02-12-2016, 11:44 AM)tomh009 Wrote: The YYZ Terminal 1 parking garage has this signage on each level, too, for indicating the number of available spots on that level. However, the signs have never been turned on, more than a year after they were installed ...
Are you sure about that? It's been a couple of years since I parked in the T1 lot (I park at Viscount and ride the LINK Train now), but I'm absolutely positive they were working.
At least not working for a long time, a year or more. I park in the terminal garage once or twice a month. Fortunately (?) I arrive ridiculously early in the morning so I know exactly where to find my parking spot.
(02-12-2016, 11:58 AM)Canard Wrote: Are you sure about that? It's been a couple of years since I parked in the T1 lot (I park at Viscount and ride the LINK Train now), but I'm absolutely positive they were working.
They were working in July, when I last parked there.
Take those cameras, without the GPS, and put them at the entrance/exit to public free lots. Use timestamps only, and you can catch not only long-stay patrons (add over-two-hour billing option), but re-park people who move cars around.
(02-12-2016, 10:21 AM)MidTowner Wrote: European cities of all sizes have extremely accurate and widespread information about parking availability...
If they can do it, we can do it here, too, and I think parking information is a great suggestion. I haven’t heard how expensive it is, but since it’s so common elsewhere it must not be prohibitively so.
Recently visited the town of San Gimignano, Italy, population 7,105. Here is the board displaying the results of their 21st century parking assistance technology:
The view from the back of the parking display board shows that the town's featured construction technology is not 21st century
Although the resident population (and tax base) might be small, the visitor population on a peak day would be big, thus incentivizing the parking assistance technology.
