The Cargo Container of the Parking Business

Albert Einstein is attributed with saying “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”

He was probably talking about parking management.

Late last month I attended the World Parking Symposium bi-annual conference.  I’ve said this before: I really like this event because it’s almost purely academic in nature.  No trade show, no product pitches... just a bunch of “parking nerds” looking 2 and 5 and 10 years into the future of parking.

Some of these parking nerds (and I use that term in the most respectful way since I consider myself to be in that group) came a long way to talk about parking:  Australia, Japan, Israel, the Netherlands, Canada and the US.  Barbara Chance presented about parking in Kuwait which I found fascinating.

What was also interesting about all these presentations is a common thread of similar problems in each locale.  Aside from the political and legal wrangling over parking – and these influences are significant and cannot be ignored – one piece of evidence was obvious to me:  parking management suffers from an absence of good data from which to make decisions.

And that’s where Einstein’s quotation comes in.

You’re probably aware that as well as being a parking nerd some people think I’m also a computer nerd (another term I use most respectfully).  Data, in my humble opinion, is easy to come by.  Computers collect mountains of data, cheaply and accurately.  It happens in all information-based industries.  And the parking industry is no exception.

Believe it or not, parking systems are awash in data!  Access control, enforcement data, vehicle counts, permit sales, appeals, revenue controls... and yet as parking managers we don’t seem quite sure what to do with all that data.  Today’s parking management systems collect mountains of data.

Or perhaps I should say “Lots” of data.  That might be more appropriate for parking.  Parking?  Lots?  Get it?  <sigh>

Chicken Shoup for the Parking Soul

So back to my point… the first half of the quote:  Are we recording and measuring the right things?  I think the answer is no.

I’ve been reading Donald Shoup’s book The High Cost of Free Parking.  Or trying to anyway.  (Okay, I’ll admit that this is the third time that I’ve started reading it, but the first couple of times I was not able to get past the initial few chapters.  With apologies to Dr. Shoup – I find it really difficult to remain engaged in this tome – Shoup’s level of academia is beyond even me!  However there’s a glimmer of hope for me:  this time around I’m up to page 127 so I think I might actually get through it all!)

In the early chapters of the book Shoup talks directly and indirectly about measuring the demand for (free) parking in terms of parking spaces per 1000 square feet of building floor area, or parking spaces per employee, and the like.

These are the measures of modern day parking planning for the modern day planner.

But the poor souls who are doing this planning don’t have good data to work from.  The trip generation studies don’t seem to be providing the right answers, as is evident by the number of spaces required by law versus the number of spaces actually being demanded by parkers.  (At least that’s what I’ve discovered in the book so far; perhaps the remaining 600 pages will tell me otherwise and I’ll have to rewrite this entire essay.)

So we're not measuring the right things in parking.

Back to Einstein:  Is the stuff we should be measuring even measurable?

That's a harder question to answer.  I’m not sure, since I'm unclear on what we should be measuring.  But as I said earlier, we sure are measuring a lot of stuff.  Is there gold in them thar data that we're measuring?

Optimistically I believe that somewhere buried in that mountain of parking data there exists some very valuable and insightful statistic, some multi-dimensional correlation, some cause-and-effect that is not immediately obvious.  Eventually someone with some quality data-mining experience far stronger than mine will tease out these data relationships and we’ll all say “Aha!  It’s so obvious!  Why didn’t we think of that earlier?!”

However therein lay another problem... there’s no way that someone could mine this data in its current form.  The systems we use today don’t talk the same language!  The data that we could be mining is being stored in different places and different formats and the chances of anyone actually being able to mine it and discover great, valuable insight are, well, perhaps close to the odds of being hit by lightning.

So with our data all scattered about in different databases and stored in different formats, how can we go spelunking for that parking gold?

Some of the benchmarking initiatives that have been started by parking organizations are a step in the right direction.  Parking managers gather information from their various computer systems, tally their utility bills, and guess how much snow has fallen.  Sadly, I must admit a little skepticism here... collecting data in this manner is time consuming and fraught with error.  These are expensive ways to gather information that we’re not even sure is the right information to collect.  Especially when we already have mountains of data available to mine.

So here’s what I propose:  let's create a standard way to measure and collect data about parking operations.

Sounds simple, eh?

Having a set of clear standards has proven in other industries that they reduce costs, increase customer choice, improve safety, and ease the interoperability of systems.  The benefits of establishing such an infrastructure are huge!

Here are some quick examples off the top of my head:

• Standardizing the width of railroad train tracks allowed for vast economic expansion across America, leading to a railroad boom – and bust - but one that ultimately led to great benefit for consumers and businesses.
• The lowly cargo container has a long history, but standardization of common sealed containers that fit similarly onto a ship, rail-car, plane or truck vastly improved the logistics business, leading to worldwide economic benefit.
• Oh, and that little thing called the Internet, based on open and extensible standards like TCP, HTTP, and many, many others has led to a sea change of how business and consumers operate in the past few decades.  How did we ever survive without e-mail, MP3 players, videos, and perhaps most importantly, the web site that you’re reading now?

Still don’t believe me?  Here are some come counter-examples:

• Cellular phone service... In Europe and much of Asia they standardized on GSM technology, perhaps not technically the best, but at least a chosen standard.  Subsequently their adoption and use of cellular-based services became much further advanced than that of North America (because we’re still arguing over different standards and have to have separate cellular networks to support each technology).
• VHS versus Beta... This oft-cited example is a classic.  Nearly identical technologies wrapped in different formats led to significant consumer confusion, infighting amongst vendors, and stunting the growth of a nascent industry for a decade (I bet on Beta... and lost).  Sadly, get ready for round two of the video format wars:  this inane battle is now being repeated with HD-DVD versus Blu-Ray, two technologies promoted for storing high-definition content like movies.  I’m not planning to bet on this one but some say Blu-Ray looks it may be the early winner.

Heck, while we’re at it I'll complain about all the world’s standardization problems:  Metric versus Imperial measures... the global power grid (220V? 120V? 50Hz? 60 Hz?).  And let's not forget to establish a common, worldwide language to facilitate communication too.

Did somebody say Esperanto?

Okay, perhaps I’m going off on a tangent.  Let’s get back to parking.

So hopefully you’ll agree that standards are important.  I believe we can standards in parking too, regardless of the politics and legal issues of parking management.  Let's focus on the technology-based standards.

I think we should start with a common language for parking data management - let's all adopt it, including the all the vendors in the parking business too.

See, it's totally simple!

Am I crazy?  Is this Pollyanna-Meets-Parking? I’ll be the first one to point out that even in our own industry we can’t agree as to the best way to park our customers.

Take the example of a basic off-street surface lot.  How do we park thee?  Let me count the ways:  (1) Pay-by-space, (2) Pay-and-display, (3) Pay-by-cell, (4) In-lane cashier, (5) In-car meter, (6) Gate.  And this is a simple example... how can we possibly be expected to standardize our data management?

That is, of course, a key issue.  We don’t all manage our parking operations the same way, so why should the vendors who provide such myriad systems commit to working to a standard?

In fact, I’ll bet that vendors will probably agree that they want standards; it makes their jobs a little easier too.  The trouble is that they want their system to become the standard.  Unfortunately this will protract the battle for standards in parking data management.

That’s why we need to focus on open standards - ones that are vendor neutral.  We should try to seek data management standards that are based on industry best practices, those that are subject to public scrutiny, must be non-proprietary and should be extensible so that they can evolve and avoid becoming outdated.

Fortunately, and perhaps surprisingly, a lot the groundwork here has already been laid so this task may actually be easier than it first appears.  There’s a type of data standard called XML (eXtensible Markup Language) that already provides the framework.

XML is successfully being used in many industries.  It fits the bill for an open, non-proprietary standard method of sharing, managing, and describing data, and it can would work in parking too.

So how do we get this XML for parking?  It must be defined and derived from things that already exist, sort of like creating a new language based on other languages.  Creating a data definition language for parking is a big job – huge, actually – and will require participation from many vested parties (vendors, parking managers, industry associations, and academics) none of whom are likely see any personal profit from this venture.

It will be great for the parking industry, though.  This is the kind of infrastructural thing we need as a foundation for future development.  It’s the cargo container of the parking business!

So this is a call-to-arms!  C’mon everybody!  Who is with me?  Who wants to create a Park-XML?  <insert appropriate inspirational musical crescendo here; I’d also accept a slow-clap>