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| Photo: Car Tower in AutoStadt, Wolfsburg, Germany; Source: Climateer Investing Blog |
Smartcitymakassar.com. --Makassar- New paradigm emerges to answer challenges faced by the old. This new strives to provide ‘optimal’ parking supply and price. Too much supply of parking lots is as harmful as too little. It is also true for price that too low is as harmful as those that are too high. Rather than extending the parking supply, it is better to provide management solution. Management solution is able to support some strategic planning objectives.
When parking management programs is cost-effective, then they can reduce parking requirements by 20%-40% compared with conventional parking requirements. Not only is it effective, but also they provide some social, economic and environment benefits, as Todd Litmann of Victoria Transport Policy Institute explained.
One of the important aspects of parking management is policy. According to Todd Litmann, there are 10 general principles on parking management that can help guide the planning decision to support planning management. Among these are important to mentions are peak management, flexibility, sharing, user information, and efficiency utilization. Peak management deals with managing the peak-demand. Flexibility is needed to accommodate uncertainty and change situation.
Sharing principle means to serve multiple users and destinations. Drivers or motorists should have information on their parking and travel options. And efficient utilization is important in term that the parking facilities is sized and managed in order to make the spaces are frequently occupied.
The well-managed parking policy can overcome the environmental and economic costs of inefficiency parking policies. Streetline adopted some studies that showing between 8%-74% of traffic in congested downtown areas is cause by parking searching. There is around 28% of drivers in Manhattan and 45% in Brooklyn cruise for parking. These studies showed also that it spends around 3.5 minutes to 14 minutes to search for a parking space each time they need to park as in the case in London, San Francisco, New York and Sydney.
Furthermore, within a 15-block area it is estimated that drivers cycling for parking could be converted into 950,000 miles excess per year, which is translated into around 47,000 gallons in wasted gas or fuels and contributes to 730 tons of carbon dioxide greenhouse gas. These above examples are a picture that should be avoided by city whose vision to be future city or smart city.* (Riad Mustafa)
