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The Parking Minute

A minute of parking news and commentary

Tony Jordan

Micrologistics: Please, take my stuff

March 14, 2019 By Tony Jordan 1 Comment

When you’re carrying your panniers after riding in the rain.

I read a post, What Autonomy Delivers, by Jonah Houston, and it lays out some scenarios for how autonomous technology could be applied to what I’m going to call micrologistics. 

Micrologistics is the activity of moving someone’s personal items around a city so they’re there when you need them and they’re safely stored when you don’t. Most people use their car for micrologistics. They can throw their stuff in the back seat or trunk and, usually, retrieve or swap items as needed.

Having a trunk is a luxury of driving that is difficult to replace. For those without a car, you gotta carry the stuff you need for your trip with you most or all of the time. 

If we expect people to stop driving so much, we need to provide micrologistical solutions. Cities might be able to help by facilitating staffed “bag checks” in commercial centers.  Portland has piloted this service for houseless people, why not provide it to everyone and let those with means pay for it?  And while we wait for the little robots that Jonah describes to move our stuff back home, some entrepreneurs might use lightweight freight (like electric cargo trikes) to let you send your bag to a storage unit closer to home where you can pick it up later.

Such services could support local businesses facing steep competition from Amazon and other logistics companies. Retailers demand ample parking because their customers need to haul things back home. Shopping in person and getting the goods delivered sometime later in the day is a model I don’t see much, but really appeals to me. Micrologistics can smooth the way for removal of street parking for transit priority lanes and scooter racks.

And maybe once people get used to not carrying all their stuff, they’ll become more comfortable with owning less stuff, too. Rental and sharing services can utilize the micrologistics networks to put lawn chairs under the butts of festival goers and camping gear into the trunks of intrepid families’ peer-to-peer car rentals.

Filed Under: Autonomous Vehicles, Micrologistics

Ride Hailing & Parking Study Sheds Light On Passenger Priorities

March 13, 2019 By Tony Jordan Leave a Comment

Image by flikr user ctj71081

A few months back, a study by Denver-based researcher Dr. Alejandro Henao found results suggesting that “ride-hailing adds a significant amount of VMT (+83.5%) to the system when accounting for dead-heading, induced travel, and substitution of more sustainable modes.“(https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/c7a0b1_3f9ac82d761c4a87ba9e17b21cf7757c.pdf)

The data for that study were collected by Dr. Henao by signing up to drive for Lyft and Uber and then recording all sorts of information about the routes, the time between routes, and the people hailing the ride.

It was apparently a pretty fruitful 14 weeks of driving for Henao. After he picked passengers up, he asked them to complete a survey about their vehicle ownership and motivations for hailing a ride. After dropping off the passenger, he looked for a parking spot near their destination, noting the time it took to find one and estimating the time cruising and walking that the Lyft ride saved the passenger.  Last month a companion study using that data was published in The Journal of Transportation and Land Use titled “The Impact of ride hailing on parking (and vice versa).” (https://www.jtlu.org/index.php/jtlu/article/view/1392)

There’s good stuff in the paper, and I encourage you to check it out, but a few findings stuck out for me:

  • 46.8% of his passengers would have driven or been driven (by taxi or other means) compared to 34.1% who would have taken transit or walked/biked
  • 12.2% of his passengers wouldn’t have made the trip at all if they didn’t take a TNC
  • Avoiding drinking and driving is the main reason his passengers took a TNC (36.6%) and parking difficulty/cost was second (20.7%)
  • On average, passengers spent more money on rides that didn’t require cruising for parking and walking
Image from “Impact of Ride Hailing on Parking” study showing reasons to use ride hailing grouped by self-reported driving frequency of rider.

I think this paints a bit more of a sympathetic picture for TNCs than we’ve been seeing lately.  Drivers substituting TNC for driving are generally doing so either because they don’t want to drink and drive (good) or, for at least some, because their city isn’t managing parking very well. 

Non-drivers are substituting some transit rides, to be sure, but probably because of time constraints.  And for every two rides taken from transit, there seems to be one ride a person takes via TNC that they couldn’t have taken because transit doesn’t go where they were headed. 

Ironically, Dr. Henao works for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, owner of the worlds “greenest” parking garage (https://pdxshoupistas.com/how-green-is-my-free-parking-structure-not-very/).

Filed Under: TNC

Introducing The Parking Minute

March 12, 2019 By Tony Jordan Leave a Comment

Welcome to the Parking Minute!

The Parking Minute is a (mostly) daily dose of parking content written by Tony Jordan.  

Tony Jordan is a parking reformer based in Portland, Oregon. As the founder of Portlanders for Parking Reform (https://pdxshoupistas.com), Tony has organized campaigns to eliminate minimum parking requirements, oppose publicly funded parking garages, and implement performance-based management of public parking at the curb.

Parking policy impacts housing affordability, climate action, transportation safety, and public policy. New mobility options like e-scooters, dockless bike share, and autonomous vehicles allow us to imagine a future with much less demand for car parking and that narrative creates a window of opportunity to enact parking reforms that will make a better future much more likely.

The Parking Minute will keep you up-to-date on parking news, including technological advances and parking policy innovations around the world. But more importantly, readers of The Parking Minute will be prepared to make the best arguments for parking reform in their city. The Parking Minute provides the links, the memes, and the talking points; you provide the energy to make changes in your community.

You can find The Parking Minute here on the web, on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or by email subscription. Content will be mostly the same on all networks, so subscribe or follow however is most convenient for you.

Well, it looks like our first minute is about up. Have a great day, we’ll see you again tomorrow.

(An image of a car parking in a very tight space with the text “Just enough parking news and commentary to fit into your busy day.”)

Filed Under: Introduction

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