But They Said I Could Park Here!

So those of you who know me know that I describe myself as a "technology nerd who fell into the world of parking".

How nerdy?  I got my first e-mail address in 1986 (yes, back when legwarmers were cool but being a nerd was not).  In 1992 I had a pair of ISDN connections in my house for a bountiful-at-the-time 128Kbps bandwidth, and I registered my first domain name and website in 1995 when Netscape launched the web revolution.

Ahhhh, it was the Internet’s halcyon days… when “spam” was still a luncheon meat, a “virus” was something that infected only living beings, and a “banner ad” was flown behind an airplane.

The Internet has evolved at a frantic pace - and continues to do so.  But nobody would quesiton that the hot Internet activity for much of the last decade has been the spectacular rise of social media – basically the generation of content created by the masses, distributed in a highly accessible and scalable way.  Two of the most popular social media sites today are Facebook and Twitter, of course.

Is there a Facebook/Twitter angle to parking technology?  Does social media even have a role in parking?

Well, at its core the business of Parking is really a business built on organizing the behavior of people.  Contrary to popular belief, parking is not about vehicles or parking spaces.  Parking services are all about people – specifically people who park.

Providing parkers with the right information at the right time is the key to encouraging the behaviors that you want them to demonstrate.  That’s where Facebook and Twitter can help.   Let’s start with Twitter.  This is a free technology that anyone can use to push out short messages to subscribers, very quickly, who can receive these messages though the web or on their phone.

If you’re going to send out such nearly real-time messages to your parking audience – Twitter would call these “tweets” –what messages would you send?

There are most likely two kinds of messages that are invaluable to a parker.  The first type of tweet is an emergency message:  For example:   “Blue Garage - West entrance blocked, use North entrance” or “Snow clearance on Main St 3pm, no parking.”

The second type of tweet that parkers find valuable is real-time information about parking at an event.  In this case the parker would subscribe to a series of tweets (called a “feed”) that was broadcast every few minutes about, say, occupancy at a lot or a garage.  Driving downtown to get to the big game?  Subscribe to a twitter feed for 3 or 4 different parking lots and receive a message every 2 minutes about how many spaces remain available – when you’re a few blocks from downtown you’ll know which garages have spaces available.  When you arrive, you unsubscribe from the feed.  Good information, happy customer, less circling the block.

Facebook, on the other hand, is much more like a traditional website - though it's evolving too.  Many parking operations already have websites, so having a Facebook page for parking might appear redundant.  Facebook provides a mostly structured interface for you to post information, photos, or other media about the parking operation and control the message that you’re putting out.

But the social component comes from the people (parkers) who subscribe to the content of the page by becoming a “friend” of the parking office.   The parking operation can choose which content, or levels of content that a “friend” can see, and can also limit the amount that a “friend” can post or comment to the page.  This gives a great deal of control to the parking operation on how information is distributed, and also provides a convenient mechanism for customer feedback and comments.

Also an interesting tidbit:  Facebook and Twitter can be connected so that Facebook can “push” updates to Twitter, which in turn pushes information to your customers.  Slick!

Are Facebook and Twitter really free?  Well, they’re free to sign up and use as much as you like.  But there is a cost - once your parkers get used to receiving tweets or visiting your page you will have an obligation to provide regular updates.  So there is a cost – not for the service, but for your operation to produce regular content for your subscribing audience.

Does social media play a role in parking?  This probably depends on your specific parking audience – a technically sophisticated parking audience (such as students on campus or frequent airport travelers) will embrace these features.  There are already groups of parkers taking matters into their own hands and using text messages to help each other when it comes to parking (NPA’s Between the Lines newsletter recently described this), so yes, there are signs that social media could be useful and appreciated by your parkers.  A less-technical audience may not be as interested.  But in any case, social media can enhance the parker’s experience, and usage is likely to grow.

On that note, be sure to follow T2 Systems on Twitter and "Like" us on Facebook! :-)

So I’ve always been sort of intrigued by electric cars.  Back in the late 1890’s and early 1900's many of the earliest car designs had electric motors… but ultimately gasoline proved to be more convenient than batteries for a hundred years or so.

Fast forward to today:  GM popularized the EV1 electric car, and then killed it, and is now bringing it back – or at least something like it.  Every major manufacturer has an electric car or a hybrid in the works.  And disruptive technologies like this give birth to new companies with new products (like Tesla Motors, for instance).

So the electric car – or a gas-electric hybrid version – is here to stay.  The big question for our industry is how this might affect parking.  Should a parking space come with an electrical outlet?  Could a parker purchase electricity on demand?

Interestingly, one only needs to look to the Northern States or Canada to find parking stalls with electrical outlets.  These were never intended for recharging… instead these outlets are designed to keep the engine from freezing on a those minus 40 degree days.  Power in these outlets may not be constant, but rather cycled on-and-off according to temperature - fine for block heaters, but not so good for vehicle charging.

Demand for electric-enabled parking stall will probably increase.  But would customers be willing to pay more to park their electrical vehicle in the electric-enabled stall?  Probably, since parkers would also reduce their "range anxiety" by gaining more charge (despite that 80% of American drivers commute less than 40 miles per day).

For on-street or surface parking there are vendors in our industry (1, 2, 3) already looking at providing the on-demand electricity for vehicle charging – I’m sure we’ll see some at the IPI conference this year.  In addition, such vendors are looking at enabling the electricity only when the parker has paid for parking – so if you don’t feed money to the meter then the meter doesn’t feed the juice to your car.

Most parking managers already know that electrical costs are a big maintenance cost for a garage.  Adding electrical outlets for parkers will increase costs further by draining even more power.  Fortunately there are solutions – installing electron-sipping LED lights helps, and adding roof-based solar or wind power generation on buttresses can make more power available.

Potentially, however, the best innovation is yet to come:  technologies suggest that tomorrow’s electric vehicle will be able to communicate with the electric grid itself.  It will be smart enough to re-charge when costs are low, trickle-charge when costs are high, and even put surplus power from the batteries back into the grid when demand is really high (presumably generating a credit for the vehicle owner).

Parking has embraced technology and change over the years, and not shockingly the rise of the electric car is likely to have an impact in our industry over the next several years.