The Parking Professional January 2019

INTERNATIONAL PARKING & MOBILITY INSTITUTE | JANUARY 2019

18

Designing the Future of Mobility Autonomous-vehicle guru Lawrence Burns on how we’ll get there

GETTING THE WORD OUT

The top marketing trends in parking and mobility for 2019. 26

TRAINING FUTURE LEADERS

Management apprenticeship programs offer new options. 30

IPMI’S YEAR IN REVIEW

All the highlights from an amazing year—and a peek ahead to 2019. 35

OPENING UP TECHNOLOGY

Why Open IP is critical for the parking industry moving ahead. 40

AIMS Delivers when others don’t.

Can’t get by crunch times for permit sales?

AIMS specializes in:

Can’t issue virtual permits?

» Ticket Management

Can’t trust your current vendor?

» Permit Management

Can’t get your LPR to work?

» Event Management

Long lines?

» Hosting Solutions

Trouble connecting to other databases?

» LPR Enforcement

Are you tired of promises and schedules not kept?

AIMS customers are satisfied and successful.

Give us a call today.

» Mobile Enforcement » Customer Web Portal » System Integration » Robust Reporting

sales@aimsparking.com | aimsparking.com | 1-800-886-6316

JANUARY 2019

VOL. 35 | NO. 1 THE INTERNATIONAL PARKING & MOBILITY INSTITUTE

Features

18

Designing the Future of Mobility

An interview with autonomous vehicle guru Lawrence Burns about the future of transportation, how we’ll get there, and what parking and mobility professionals should be doing now to prepare.

26

Getting the Word Out

The top marketing trends parking and mobility organizations need to know about in 2019.

By Bill Smith, APR

30

Training Future Parking Industry Leaders

Management apprenticeship programs offer new options.

By Robert Fries, CAPP

35

2018 IPMI Year in Review

40

Opening Up Parking Management Technology

Beyond just our name change, all the highlights from an amazing year—and a peek ahead.

Open IP is the future of parking and mobility tech.

By Gorm Tuxem

2 THE PARKING PROFESSIONAL | JANUARY 2019 | PARKING-MOBILITY.ORG

EDITOR’S NOTE

Departments 4 ENTRANCE

Do You Know Your Customer?

By Brent Paxton

6 FIVE THINGS

About an Autonomous Future

8 MOBILITY & TECH

A (Very) Brief History of Personal Mobility Innovation

By Blake Laufer, CAPP

1 0 THE GREEN STANDARD

Micro-mobility Services and Lemonade Stands

By JC Porter, CAPP

1 2 THE BUSINESS OF PARKING A Match Made in Heaven

By Bill Smith

1 4 ON THE FRONTLINE Ethical Leadership: Not for the Timid

By Cindy Campbell

1 5 PARKING SPOTLIGHT

Is New Technology Worth It?

By Blake Laufer, CAPP, and Christopher Perry

1 7 ASK THE EXPERTS 4 6 IN SHORT 4 8 STATE AND REGIONAL

SPOTLIGHT A Year of Sharing in Texas

By Mary B. Mabry, CAPP

5 0 AROUND THE INDUSTRY

O

Past Evidence

NE OF THE UNIQUE THINGS ABOUT LIVING in an old house is you can look around and see how the progression of technology has changed our lives. There are round patches in my 1939 Cape Cod’s floors where radiators used to stand, long before anyone installed a furnace or central air conditioning (the house also has a closed-off room in the basement with plain cinderblock walls and a dirt floor, where the big oil tank that fed those radiators used to live). Twisted telephone wire is tucked atop molding that runs up the staircase and then stapled around the master bedroom’s door frame because it was too hard to try and retrofit it through plaster and lathe walls—the same thick walls that block the Wi-Fi signal from reaching some spaces. Several rooms, including a bedroom, have only one electrical outlet each, and the garage is detached and was built with large windows on two sides; if the home’s first occupant was wealthy enough to actually use it for a car instead of garden-tool storage, he sure wanted the neighbors to know about it.

I started thinking about my house shortly after a conversation with Lawrence Burns, longtime General Motors research and development executive and author of “Autonomy: The Quest to Build the Driverless Car—and How it Will Reshape Our World,” among other things. I wondered what will happen to houses and roads and things as mundane as gas stations if his vision of shared, electric, autonomous vehicles comes to fruition when he says it will (you’re going to have to read this issue to find out when that is). How will our streets and communities change?

And how long until someone looks at the oil stains in my old garage as a relic from a really bygone era?

I’ve had the pleasure of talking with Larry several times, and it’s always both fascinating and a delight. We at IPMI are thrilled he’ll keynote the 2019 IPMI Conference & Expo in Anaheim, Calif., in June and can’t wait to hear what he has to say to our industry about where parking professionals go from here. Plan to join us (register at IPIConference. parking.org), and in the meantime, read our interview with him starting on p. 18. It’s illuminating to say the least. After that, please join us at forum.parking-mobility.org and share your thoughts.

There’s a lot more to read in this issue. As always, please reach out anytime.

Until next month…

5 6 PARKING CONSULTANTS 5 8 ADVERTISERS INDEX 5 9 CALENDAR

fernandez@parking-mobility.org

THE PARKING PROFESSIONAL | JANUARY 2019 | PARKING-MOBILITY.ORG 3

ENTRANCE Publisher Shawn Conrad, CAE conrad@parking-mobility.org Editor Kim Fernandez fernandez@parking-mobility.org Technical Editor Rachel Yoka, CAPP, LEED AP BD+C yoka@parking-mobility.org Assistant Editor Monica Arpino arpino@parking-mobility.org Contributing Editor Bill Smith, APR bsmith@smith-phillips.com Advertising Sales Bonnie Watts, CEM watts@parking-mobility.org Subscriptions Tina Altman taltman@parking-mobility.org.

Publication Design BonoTom Studio info@bonotom.com Proofreader Melanie Padgett Powers For advertising information, contact Bonnie Watts at watts@parking-mobility.org or 571.699.3011.

For subscription changes, contact Tina Altman, taltman@ parking-mobility.org.

The Parking Professional (ISSN 0896-2324 & USPS 001436) is published monthly by the International Parking & Mobility Institute.

1330 Braddock Place, Suite 350 Alexandria, VA 22314 Phone: 571.699.3011 Fax: 703.566.2267 Email: info@parking-mobility.org Website: parking-mobility.org Postmaster note: Send address label changes promptly to: The Parking Professional 1330 Braddock Place, Suite 350 Alexandria, VA 22314 Interactive electronic version of The Parking Professional for members and subscribers only at parking-mobility. org/tpp.

Periodical postage paid at Alexandria, Va., and additional mailing offices. Copyright © International Parking & Mobility Institute, 2019. Statements of fact and opinion expressed in articles contained if The Parking Professional are the sole responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent an official expression of policy or opinion on the part of officers or the members of IPMI. Manuscripts, correspondence, articles, product releases, and all contributed materials are welcomed

by The Parking Professional; however, publication is subject to editing, if deemed necessary to conform to standards of publication.

The subscription rate is included in IPMI annual dues.

Subscription rate for non-members of IPMI is $120 per year (U.S. currency) in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. All other countries, $150. Back issues, $10.

The Parking Professional is printed on 10 percent recycled paper and on paper from trees grown specifically for that purpose.

Do You Know Your Customer?

By Brent Paxton

I

RECENTLY SPENT SOME RECONNAISSANCE TIME discussing parking and mobility services with one of the most candid conversationalists I know— my soon-to-be-driving (with a learner’s permit), high school freshman daughter. As a typical character you’d see on a recent Progressive commercial (yes, I am turning into my dad), I spent considerable time trying to convince her that she doesn’t need to drive so soon—wait until you’re a senior, I advised. And with the evolution of autonomous vehicles, I continued, perhaps you don’t even need a driver’s license.

With a roll of her eyes and the wit of her mom, she proceeded to share half a dozen reasons I would want her to drive in two months (and she was right). Further, she explained, while she certainly plans to use ride-share and driverless cars (when they ever actually exist, she mocks) for a variety of special occasions, there is no way she would ever consider relying upon them completely. And with that, she shoved her iPhone in my face with an article on Porsche Passport, the car subscription service program being piloted in Atlanta, our home city. She quickly turned on her Dad’s traits and started hard-selling the service and all the benefits it could provide to our entire family. Research over—I know when to walk away!

While losing arguments with her happens more often than I care to admit, this exchange really got me thinking about knowing your customer.

I think we all realize the future wave of our driving population will demand more and more frictionless parking technology and make payments ubiquitous across a broad multi-modal transportation network. But that customer is the obvious one. What about the growing list of new customers to our industry—the shared-service provider customers who consume parking traditionally but also want to buy parking inventory through different business

4 THE PARKING PROFESSIONAL | JANUARY 2019 | PARKING-MOBILITY.ORG

models? Does an Uber or Bird desire the same parking service at the curb as an Amazon or Instacart delivery service partner? Will ZipCar’s service have different parking needs than a Porsche subscription service in a garage? And how does our parking inventory integrate with all these newcomers to the shared economy?

When viewing the customer through this new lens, I began to wonder how well we truly know our extended customer base and, further, whether we care about that experience? My challenge to all of us is that we begin to realize the significant opportunity we have been given with the explosion of mobility services and recognize they, too, are our customers. We should want—dare I say need—to be able to serve them in both a professional and technical way. Let’s be certain to understand the particular attributes of our parking inventory and how it uniquely serves a broader customer continuum, making our customer’s parking experience an enjoyable one for every player involved.

BRENT PAXTON is chief

business development officer with Premium Parking and a member of IPMI’s Board of Directors. He can be reached at bpaxton@premiumparking. com.

Strategic Planning and Management Maintenance and Restoration Design and Construction Technologies www.kimley-horn.com/parking

5

THINGS TO KNOW

About an Autonomous Future

1 2 4 5

In 1925, the Houdina Radio Control Co. unveiled its driverless car, called the American Wonder, on the streets of New York City. The radio-controlled vehicle flew down Fifth Avenue and honked its horn—and for a little while, driverless cars seemed right on the horizon. Unfortunately, the car soon crashed into another car—one filled with photographers. Experiment over. Source: blogs.discovermagazine.com.

Japan got into the act in 1977, when the Tsukuba Mechanical Engineering Laboratory developed a vehicle guided by machine vision, using multiple cameras. The car could follow white markings and reach a top speed of 20 miles an hour. That technology was taken further in the 1980s, when an effort backed by Mercedes-Benz developed a van that could reach high speeds without a driver.

The VAMORS drove on the Autobahn. Source: thoughtco.com.

3

WIKICOMMONS

Autonomous cars make headlines almost every day and you might think that’s a new thing. But self-driving vehicles have been on the minds of designers and entrepreneurs for a very long time, and they’ve each had different ideas of when we’d all stop driving ourselves around. Here are five thoughts on the topic.

Circuits were embedded into roads in Nebraska and New Jersey in the 1950s. They were supposed to detect driverless cars and help them navigate their way, and the 1956 Firebird II had receivers for the system built in.

Driverless cars are almost here, people thought, and the system continued into the 1960s, when The Ohio State University, the U.S. Bureau of Public Roads, and the Bendix Corporation all jumped in.

Unfortunately, the circuited roads were expensive and never took off. Source: engineering.com.

6 THE PARKING PROFESSIONAL | JANUARY 2019 | PARKING-MOBILITY.ORG

SHUTTERSTOCK / VECTORBRO / EIGHTSHOT STUDIO; ISTOCK / JUST_SUPER

A 1998 study predicted huge growth in the autonomous vehicle market by 2026, even as the public grows more wary of the technology. The study said some level 5 autonomous cars, which require an alert person behind a wheel for situational intervention, will provide revenue by 2019. The U.S. will dominate the market, the report says, followed by Europe and Asia.

Source: forbes.com.

CREDIT / CREDIT

The National Automated Highway System Consortium, made up of nine public and private organizations, including General Motors, Carnegie Mellon, and Lockheed Martin, was developed in 1994 to write a congressional report about driverless cars.

Three years later, a driverless demonstration car traveled down eight miles of highway so well that the Associated Press said an automated highway would be running by 2002. Source: gas2.org.

Educate

* Mentor * Network

Women in Parking

Sparking d versity.

Be a part of history in the making.

Help diversify our industry by joining Women in Parking.

womeninparking.com

MOBILITY & TECH

A (Very) Brief History of Personal Mobility Innovation

By Blake Laufer, CAPP

T

he year is 1817. Author Jane Austen dies. The New York Stock Exchange is founded. And both the scooter and the bicycle are invented. The scooter and the bike were born as wheeled platforms, pushed by the foot. The primary difference between them is whether the rider coasts in a standing or sitting position. (Incidentally, the bicycle was originally called a “velocipede,” which is undoubtedly a far cooler name).

In the 1830s, pedals were added to the bicycle.

With a little bit of balance, and lifting one’s feet off the street, the newfangled bicycle showed promise for mobility. It overshadowed the kick-scooter to become the focus of attention and innovation for personal mobility for nearly two centuries.

Bone Shakers

Early bicycles were difficult to ride due to a high center of gravity, resistance from the pedals, and their weighty, mostly wooden frames. Even the Penny Farthing (one of the most recognized early bicycles, with that gigantic front tire and absurdly small rear wheel) was mostly a curiosity and showpiece and not well-adopted by the common people.

Furthermore, in those days the so-called modern roads (where they existed) were unfriendly to cyclists. Bikes were often referred to as “bone shakers” for obvious reasons. The shock absorber didn’t show up on bicycles for another half-century.

Nevertheless, in 1889 a safer bicycle design emerged based on a diamond-shaped metal frame and balanced wheels. This new bike rapidly gained widespread acceptance for personal mobility, and it’s still the basic design we use for most bikes today. By 1900 there was a folding version, gears had been added, and at least one early electric “e-bike” existed.

Throughout the 20th century, motorized versions of the bike evolved into the motorcycle, the motorized scooter (such as that made globally popular by the Italian brand Vespa), and the moped—each with subtle differentiating factors, such as horsepower or frame design.

Of course, one practical application of a sit-down, electric-motor scooter is to assist those with mobility issues. And that brings us to modern-day innovation.

Modern Scooting

At the 2018 Consumer Electronics Show (a place where you can find cutting-edge technology applied

8 THE PARKING PROFESSIONAL | JANUARY 2019 | PARKING-MOBILITY.ORG

How does a scooter win an innovation award? First, this is a mobility scooter that doesn’t look like a mobility scooter. Next, it’s intended for everybody, regardless of mobility issues. And third, it’s strong but lightweight, with a state-of-the-art design that folds down to the size of carry-on luggage.

to just about any device, often with blatant disregard of whether the technology is practical) the innovation award was given to the Relync R1 electric mobility scooter.

How does a scooter win an innovation award? First, this is a mobility scooter that doesn’t look like a mobility scooter. Next, it’s intended for everybody, regardless of mobility issues. And third, it’s strong but lightweight, with a state-of-the-art design that folds down to the size of carry-on luggage.

Now the electronics: This scooter offers a dashboard with a ring of LED lights for never-get-lost navigation and pairs to your smartphone with Bluetooth. The scooter also incorporates automatic speed adaptation using gyroscopic sensors, a form of cruise control. Your phone can also locate it, track it, and even remotely lock the wheels.

It has GPS and cellular connectivity. There are intelligent alarm notifications and tamper-resistant functionality as well. Oh, and of course there’s a USB port to charge your devices.

Adding a smartphone to a scooter doesn’t make it innovative; it’s the overall rethinking of the design that makes this a winner.

Your smartphone may be able to connect to control a scooter, manage your online portfolio, or even read “Pride and Prejudice.” But it’s not a requirement. We can still trade stocks or read a good book the old-fashioned way as we have for centuries. And occasionally it’s also enjoyable to put the smartphone away, go outside, and take that velocipede for a spin.

Every Ticket Imaginable 800.241.8662 | info@southlandprinting.com

BLAKE LAUFER, CAPP, is president of MiStall Insight

and co-chair of IPMI’s Technology Committee. He can be reached at blake@mistall.com.

THE PARKING PROFESSIONAL | JANUARY 2019 | PARKING-MOBILITY.ORG 9

THE GREEN STANDARD

Micro-mobility Services and Lemonade Stands

By JC Porter, CAPP

G

ROWING UP, I REMEMBER OWNING A LEMONADE STAND TO EARN MONEY. As a kid, my siblings and I thought the $0.25 we earned per cup was straight profit. We did not consider the cost of the cups, pitcher, table, chair, signs, or the lemonade—we didn’t pay for them. The $13 that we put in the piggy bank was a loss of at least twice that to our parents, but not a consideration in the celebration of our profit.

This childhood experience translates to today’s growing micro-mobilty industry. Bike-share and scooter rental companies provide personal transportation that is cheap and easy to access. The solution these businesses provide has the potential to be a long-desired remedy for the first- and last-mile transport needed to boost the use of public transportation.

The controversy is that these businesses ventured into the transportation market with a lemonade-stand plan.

Paying for the Lemonade Stand

These bike and scooter concepts are making a profit and meeting an unmet consumer transportation need. However, someone has to pay for the metaphorical lemonade stand.

Emerging micromobility services are creating frictionless systems that may move our society toward sustainable transportation and benefit commuters in ways previously not considered. But we have to consider the cost of the supplies needed for the lemonade stand, and the work it takes to make the full business model operational and reliable for the future.

10 THE PARKING PROFESSIONAL | JANUARY 2019 | PARKING-MOBILITY.ORG

New technology moves from concept to implementation at a rate far faster than the full effects of such actions may be realized. To keep up with this pace, cities and universities must make policies and procedures broad and flexible with consideration for the true cost of all involved and balancing the needs of the community.

One of the most undervalued assets of cities and universities is curb space and the space behind the curb. The cost to build and maintain this space must be considered, plus the amount of revenue this area could generate depending on the transportation service that will be using the space, all the while making sure that sidewalks are accessible and easily navigated.

New technology moves from concept to implementation at a rate far faster than the full effects of such actions may be realized. To keep up with this pace, cities and universities must make p ­ olicies and procedures broad and flexible with consideration for the true cost of all involved and balancing the needs of the community.

Considering Speed

The cost to oversee the programs that regulate these areas of public passage and use must be considered, and private profit at public expense should be minimized. Programs to provide orderly use and prevent obstruction of accessibility require infrastructure, maintenance, and enforcement budgets. These rules, regulations, and construction projects in the physical world are not free and are not able to be implemented at the speed of mobile app development.

Emerging micro-mobility services are creating frictionless systems that may move our society toward sustainable transportation and benefit commuters in ways previously not considered. But we have to consider the cost of the supplies needed for the lemonade stand and the work it takes to make the full business model operational and reliable for the future. The innovation of tech companies in this industry is necessary to tackle the challenges we face as a society, and cities and universities should embrace their ingenuity. At the same time, it is necessary for these companies to responsibly engage with cities and universities to identify the full impact of their ideas on the community and the needed infrastructure before ­flooding sidewalks.

JC PORTER, CAPP, is assistant director of commuter

services at Arizona State University and a member of IPMI’s Sustainability Committee. He can be reached at j.porter@asu.edu.

WGI was here

To accommodate future high-rises for Ann Arbor’s redevelopment, the 10-foot-thick foundation for this project required one of Michigan’s largest continuous concrete pours, taking more than 36 hours hours.

ENGINEERING // TRANSPORTATION // GEOSPATIAL // ENVIRONMENTAL // ARCHITECTURE PLANNING // STRUCTURAL SYSTEMS // LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE // UTILITY SERVICES CREATIVE SERVICES // PARKING SOLUTIONS

WGIparking.com Offices Nationwide | 866.909.2220

THE PARKING PROFESSIONAL | JANUARY 2019 | PARKING-MOBILITY.ORG 11

THE BUSINESS OF PARKING | MARKETING

A Match Made in Heaven

By Bill Smith, APR

Edmonton International Airport (EIA) provides a great example of how this approach can succeed. EIA’s jetSet Parking is a fighting brand designed to allow the airport to compete with off-site parking providers and transportation network companies (TNCs) such as Uber or Lyft. JetSet relies on a pre-booking platform to create a structure for discounted reservation pricing versus drive-up rates and to respond quickly to competitor price changes through promotional codes.

Think of jetSet as the entrepreneurial arm of EIA’s parking system. It can be creative with pricing and other operational initiatives to remain competitive with inexpensive competitors. It can also be creative with its marketing.

Creative Parking Campaign

The airport showed this creativity with a recent advertising campaign designed to encourage travelers to book parking in advance. In addition to increasing market share, the program was meant

to encourage repeat visits, maintain a stable revenue stream, and ultimately increase parking revenue.

The concept, which was developed and scripted in-house, was based on the dating apps that have become so popular. The idea was to create the initial impression the ad was about dating before the listener or reader realized it was really a parking ad. The campaign combined digital, radio , and television ads, as well as billboards.

Here’s a sample script from one of the radio ads:

Male single: At first, I wasn’t looking for anything long-term. I had a lot of baggage, and that’s not easy to deal with. My previous relationship broke the bank. I never expected I’d find my perfect match. jetSet Parking was exactly what I was looking for—now I have a travel partner who’s cheaper than a dinner date.

Announcer: Find your perfect match for as low as 5-50 a day, including G-S-T at Jet Set Parking! Whether you need a one-night stay or something long term, jetSet has a spot for you. And if you’re flying with WestJet you can check your baggage right at the lot. Book online at jet-set-parking-dot-com with the promo code “commitment”!

Here’s another:

Female single: I was so tired of being disappointed—you find a match, and it doesn’t work out. All I wanted?

12 THE PARKING PROFESSIONAL | JANUARY 2019 | PARKING-MOBILITY.ORG

[Dreamily] Someone to take care of me [Insistent] Someone to help me with my baggage [Excited] And then ... I found my perfect match.

Announcer: Find your perfect match for as low as 5-50 a day including G-S-T at jetSet Parking! Whether you need a onenight stay or something long term, jetSet promises they’ll take care of you. And if you are flying with WestJet you can even check your baggage right at the lot.

Book online at jet-set-parking-dot-com with the promo code “commitment”!

Success

All the advertising in this campaign demonstrated the same whimsical sense of humor. It also caught travelers’ attention apparently because online bookings in jetSet increased 10 percent year over year during the campaign period, and the total booking numbers directly generated from the campaign (as measured through the promo code) represented 72 percent of total online bookings for jetSet. According to EIA, the return on investment on the campaign was 1,934 percent. Not a bad return.

The EIA dating campaign is a great example of how marketing can be fun— and that when you have fun in your marketing, there’s a good chance that you’ll have success too.

BILL SMITH, APR, is principal of

Smith-Phillips Strategic Communications and contributing editor of The Parking Professional. He can be reached at bsmith@smithphillips.com or 603.491.4280.

SHUTTERSTOCK / ANGELH

I

F YOU’RE A REGULAR READER OF THIS COLUMN you know I love it when organizations make their marketing programs fun. Lighthearted messages and approaches catch people’s eyes, and if a campaign is well-crafted it will hold their attention.

#winning Team discounts pay massive dividends.

Register early to save – and take your career (and your team) to the next level.

Get going and register today.

The 2019 IPMI Conference & Expo will provide invaluable insights on the latest industry disruptors and the potential effects on your organization, while providing real takeaway value and concepts to implement and prepare for the future.

Early-bird registration saves $300 and ends February 15, 2019.

Register for #IPMI2019 -- expand your perspective, attend world-class education, and succeed in your career.

IPIConference.parking.org

The must-attend event for parking, transportation, and mobility professionals

ON THE FRONTLINE

Ethical Leadership: Not for the Timid

By Cindy Campbell

I

SPENT MANY YEARS WORKING WITHIN A UNIVERSITY PARKING and transportation organization. I recall thinking early in my career that if I ever got the chance to promote into supervision, I’d make certain I would be the most supportive, positive boss ever. Having had the experience of working with a supervisor I believed wasn’t as supportive as they could be, I felt certain that if given the chance, I’d knock it out of the ballpark.

What’s that saying—’Be careful of what you ask for’?

That goal stuck with me, and as a new supervisor, I made a concerted effort to offer my unwavering support at every opportunity. After just three months, it was time to complete my first round of written employee evaluations. First giant mistake: With best intentions, I gave everyone who worked on my team a substantially above average or even outstanding rating, even those who hadn’t done anything to deserve high marks. I just knew that this heaping helping of positive reinforcement would set me up for future success as a supervisor and would motivate everyone to do their best. Naively, I assumed that this would develop the team. I didn’t realize it then, but my actions could not have been more significantly misguided.

Backfiring

Now, we all know how office chatter works. No matter the topic, it rarely takes long for word to get out. Before long, everyone was talking about the glowing evaluations I’d given to every member of the team. The staff who had never made any real effort to meet or exceed established goals and expectations were surprised—even thrilled—

with their high ratings. Not surprisingly, to those who had sincerely applied themselves and had consistently made the effort to do their best work, the overthe-top evaluations for everyone came as an insult. After all, if members of the team can earn gold stars and top ratings for little or no effort, what’s the point of trying? Hmmm. Excellent question, isn’t it?

In my misguided attempt to motivate and encourage the team, I had inadvertently demotivated hard-working team members and planted seeds of distrust in my leadership. I discovered rather quickly that my poorly conceived plan had blown up in my face.

Ethical Leadership

Had I understood and applied some of the basic concepts of ethical leadership to that initial evaluation process, those efforts would have led me down a very different path. Here are three key points of ethical leadership I should have considered: 1. Consider the effects, both positive and negative. In my haste to gain favor and trust, I clearly failed to stop and think about what the consequences of my decision would be. An important part of ethical leadership requires us to recognize when it’s time to hit the

14 THE PARKING PROFESSIONAL | JANUARY 2019 | PARKING-MOBILITY.ORG

pause button. Had I taken the time to think it through, I likely would have made a different choice.

2. Take the time to think about your values and principles as a leader. When was the last time you sat down and really thought about this? Where are you as a leader today? Have you unintentionally strayed over time? Ethical leadership requires reconnecting with your deepest values and principles and reexamining how you think, decide, and behave. Are your actions as a leader practical and principled? Are you doing the right thing for the right reasons? Ethical leaders cultivate loyalty and unify people around a noble purpose.

3. Lead with purpose. Our success as leaders comes when we can maintain our focus on pursuing a higher purpose. Operating with purpose helps us to lead with significance.

Remember, ethical leadership means doing the next right thing, not the next thing right.

CINDY CAMPBELL is IPMI’s

senior training and development specialist. She is available for onsite training and professional development and can be reached at campbell@parkingmobility.org.

PARKING SPOTLIGHT | ANALYSIS

Is New Technology Worth It?

By Blake Laufer, CAPP, and Christopher Perry

A

NYONE WITH A FEW YEARS IN PARKING KNOWS technology is advancing rapidly within our industry. Three of the latest trends seem to be in the areas of mobile apps, wayfinding tools, and video analytics. Many of these new technologies affect the operator and user in near equal parts.

As an example, wayfinding applications improve the users’ commute by making it easier to find a parking location near their destinations. This same application drives volume to the facility that makes its inventory available to the platform. This symbiotic relationship adds variables to the analysis equation that are difficult to quantify. The puzzle is how to quantify the investment in new tech with the benefits it provides.

Traditionally, the measure of success for new tech was to answer the questions, “Will this increase my revenues?” or “Will this save me money?” These seemingly simple questions have difficult answers; with so many moving parts in a parking operation, it’s tough to pinpoint a change to profit and loss as the result of a specific technology.

New measures of success are even more difficult to quantify. The most popular question when assessing new tech is “Does this technology improve my customers’ experience?” Measuring the customer experience can be even more challenging as customers are much more apt to provide negative feedback

than positive and a net promoter score doesn’t mean much when parkers are one-time visitors.

Finally, the expansion of environmental concerns is another metric against which success is measured. New systems must offer some level of “greenness,” either by eliminating paper or greenhouse gasses or offering some other triple-bottom-line benefit.

Is it possible to purchase new technology and measure success in all these ways? It’s possible, but it takes forethought to measure key performance indicators—financial, customer satisfaction, and green-cred—before the new system is in place and then

measure them again periodically after the new tech is installed to truly understand whether the value proposition has been achieved.

The Parking Technology Archipelago

Technology in parking tends to be ­accretive—you add new technologies to your parking operation, but you don’t eliminate old technologies, often for fear or inconvenience of removing legacy options for customers. Subsequently, there are more and more systems implemented than are retired, leading to what’s known as system creep.

New parking tech generally integrates with the other systems already out there. No technology can be an island— it needs to have a bridge to the other systems in a parking operation. Even the most robust, unified parking management solution still needs to connect to other systems. The collection of parking systems is an archipelago, with visible elements showing their face to operator and consumers while the connected parts exist just below the surface.

Parking operators don’t want to be locked into a specific solution, particularly a proprietary one. Forward-thinking operators want the ability to evolve their systems to include new technologies; the parking operation needs technologies that can accommodate future needs. This comes from an open, expandable approach to system architecture. In today’s parking world a closed system is a system without a future. Parking operators are ensuring inter-­operability between systems by

THE PARKING PROFESSIONAL | JANUARY 2019 | PARKING-MOBILITY.ORG 15

Measuring the customer experience can be even more challenging as customers are much more apt to provide negative feedback than positive and a net promoter score doesn’t mean much when parkers are one-time visitors.

requesting it from vendors up front and writing it into the request for proposal.

For what it’s worth, system integration used to be extraordinarily difficult, and it’s good news that in many ways connectivity is getting easier. The latest generation of parking tech almost always includes an API (application programming interface) for exchanging data. This creates a near plug-and-play model for connecting systems. Furthermore, the IPMI, British Parking Association, and European Parking Association’s Alliance for Parking Data Standards (APDS) are establishing the framework of sharing parking data both inside and outside the industry.

The Rise of Video Analytics

If a picture is worth a thousand words, video must be worth 1 million! Perhaps the most impactful change to parking in the past decade is the incorporation of video analytics into the operation. Two common forms of video analytics are license plate recognition (LPR) and object presence/detection.

The cost of video hardware and graphics processing units has dropped dramatically, so what used to be an expensive purchase can work with just about any off-theshelf video camera with sufficient image resolution. Of course, lighting, angles, and obstructions are still challenging factors when it comes to getting a clean image.

That leads to a second cost advantage: The artificial intelligence behind these systems has become much cheaper for vendors to implement. Whether it’s recognizing the letters and digits of a license plate or observing objects moving in a parking lot, the cost of machine learning is a fraction of what it used to be.

As video analytics platforms continue to develop, so will the possible applications of the technology. Software is currently available to retrofit with existing camera infrastructure, and object detection software measures occupancy and alerts operators of possible enforcement events. Soon, video analytics will detect the make and model of a vehicle or the presence of a traffic or parking violation. The extensions of these technologies certainly

add value to the parking system but also add complexity and ambiguity to the purchasing decision.

Conclusion

Technological developments are occurring at a fast and furious rate and frequently outpace the speed at which the market adopts them. They do not focus on making existing solutions better but create new solutions that address existing solved and unsolved problems. They do not attempt to fit nicely into departmental or operational silos but approach things from a new perspective. They do not simply improve the bottom line but affect the customer’s experience and the environment. As tech continues to evolve, so too must our methods of evaluating their worth.

When analyzing new tech, parking operators should consider the following: ■■ Simplify your operation by eliminating outdated technology that your customers don’t use.

■■ Software is the new hardware. Look for software systems that work with generic and off-the-shelf hardware rather than specialty equipment.

■■ Embrace the Alliance for Parking Data Standards (APDS). This new data standard will make it easier for your vendors to serve you better.

■■ Measure the non-financial value of your parking. Every data point you can gather will help you tune your parking operation and messaging.

16 THE PARKING PROFESSIONAL | JANUARY 2019 | PARKING-MOBILITY.ORG

BLAKE LAUFER, CAPP, is president of Mistall Insight

and co-chair of IPMI’s Technology Committee. He can be reached at blake@mistall.com.

CHRISTOPHER PERRY is principal of ParkTrans

Solutions and a member of IPMI’s Technology Committee. He can be reached at christopher.perry@ parktranssolutions.com.

ASK THE

EXPERTS

When do you think parking professionals should start making solid plans for electric, autonomous vehicles, and what’s the biggest thing they should consider to start?

Casey Jones, CAPP Vice President Timothy Haahs & Associates, Inc.

The time has come for cities large and small to start planning for autonomous vehicles (AVs). Though they may never completely replace traditional vehicles, it is clear they’ll play a part in our transportation systems moving forward.

The first step is to build the regulatory framework and complementary operational plan for curb management that accommodates multiple transportation modes, not just AVs.

Larry Cohen, CAPP Executive Director Lancaster Parking Authority

Now! Initial planning should start now in preparation for some of the changes that are imminent, including electric-vehicle charging stations, review of on-street ordinances to accommodate the different modes of transportation for curbside management, and consideration of the impact on new garage construction.

Barbara Chance, PhD

President and CEO CHANCE Management Advisors, Inc. Parking pros need to keep track of what is happening in their own environments, not what may be hoped for in someone else’s.

Hailed fleet vehicles will be much different from individually owned autonomous vehicles, and the presence of each will vary across the country. Adequate space for parking as well as any type of pick-up/dropoff will be key for most places, regardless of the vehicles used.

James C. Anderson Regional Sales Manager Watson Bowman Acme Corp.

Parking professionals need to understand and prepare now for the ongoing evolution of artificial intelligence, transportation modes, and vehicular technologies. The first thing to understand from a parking perspective is the safe and efficient access/ egress of ride-sharing modes. Secondary is the importance of recharging service opportunities of alternative-fuel vehicles.

Mark Lyons, CAPP

Parking Manager City of Sarasota, Fla. First, begin to ask yourself, what is it about autonomous vehicle technology and services that you do not know.

Then, develop your knowledge and explore potential changes to your operations, so that a strategy can be envisioned.

HAVE A QUESTION? Send it to editor@parking-mobility.org and watch this space for answers from the experts.

The opinions and thoughts expressed by the contributors do not necessarily reflect the opinions and viewpoints of the International Parking & Mobility Institute or official policies of IPMI.

THE PARKING PROFESSIONAL | JANUARY 2019 | PARKING-MOBILITY.ORG 17

DESIGNING THE

FUTURE OF

MOBILITY

An interview with autonomous vehicle guru Lawrence Burns about the future of transportation, how we’ll get there, and what parking and mobility professionals should be doing now to prepare.

GENERAL MOTORS LLC

S

TART TALKING ABOUT AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES and how we’ll all get around in the future, and it won’t be long before somebody mentions Larry Burns. Longtime head of research and development for General Motors

and consultant to Waymo (formerly Google’s self-driving car project) since 2011, Burns’ book, “Autonomy: The Quest to Build the Driverless Car—and How it will Reshape Our World,” made huge waves when it was published in August 2018. Burns was also one of the principal minds behind Babcock Ranch, the first community designed for a shared, autonomous transportation system (see the December 2017 issue of The Parking Professional for more), and is considered one of the world’s leading experts on autonomy and the next generation of transportation.

He recently sat down with The Parking Professional to talk about autonomy, parking, mobility, and where they all fit together.

ISTOCK/ NIKADA

THE PARKING PROFESSIONAL | JANUARY 2019 | PARKING-MOBILITY.ORG 19

The Parking Professional: Why did you write “Autonomy?” Why now?

Larry Burns: I wanted to teach a mainstream audience about autonomous vehicles. That was the goal from the beginning. So much is going on in the whole area of transportation, and it’s all going to affect everybody’s life in some way. People haven’t had a chance to think about how their lives are going to change in the next 20 years.

It was my co-author Chris Shulgan’s idea two and a half years ago to take on this project. It really was the belief that people didn’t see how autonomous vehicles and electric vehicles and the transportation-service business model could combine in a much more dramatic way than just autonomous vehicles by themselves or electric vehicles by themselves. Having had a chance to connect those dots when I was leading the program for sustainable mobility at Columbia University and having thought about transportation technology for a long and big part of my career, I thought we needed to let the companies that were going to be impacted in a big way get out in front of this and let the people whose jobs are going to be impacted get a sense and appreciation of what was going on.

We thought we had great characters so we wrote the narrative about this race to build the driverless car.

20 THE PARKING PROFESSIONAL | JANUARY 2019 | PARKING-MOBILITY.ORG

Positioning it as a quest and a narrative was very compelling and a story people were going to want to read. We modeled it after “The Big Short” and “The Right Stuff,” and that’s what we were reaching for. I’ve always believed autonomous vehicles were real ever since the DARPA Challenge in 2007, and I could see this inevitable ticking point for electric vehicles was really getting close. Then certainly Uber and Lyft and others started changing the transportation model. Those pieces were in place, and I think what was missing was connecting the dots.

There’s a moment in the book when you’re at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Challenge [a series of long-distance, autonomousvehicle races in different environments] and watching it all happen. Was that the moment when it clicked in your head and you thought this was really going to be a thing?

The actual moment was when they were handing out the trophy and $2 million check. Of course the check didn’t come to me personally. General Motors and Carnegie Mellon, I think, ended up splitting the check. It wasn’t for us as individuals. Tony Tether, the head of the ­DARPA transportation project, the folks who had these races across the desert and the urban challenge, I asked him when the next race would be. And he said there wouldn’t be another race because we’d had three already. I asked him why not, and he said, “mission accomplished.” All of the teams competing had proved to Tony and DARPA that autonomous vehicle transportation was real, and Tony said it was really up to the commercial sector to run with it and develop it to its full potential.

When Tony reached that conclusion, it was pretty impactful to me—that was November 2007. I never dreamed it would go as fast as it has. If Google hadn’t stepped up and said they were going to go for it, I don’t think the auto industry would have done this on its own. They’re just not inclined to disrupt themselves to the extent of taking the driver out of the car. It took Google and Lyft and Uber and those folks to really shake the auto industry into this opportunity and almost force them to get skin in the game.

You talk a lot in the book about the auto company executive car guys—guys who are into their cars and the size of their engines and how fast they can go—and how hard it was to get them to see this as really where the next steps were going to be. Was there a moment where you turned them around or when they bought in?

What will convince you is when you get your first chance to take a ride in a truly autonomous car. You ride in those cars and you’re blown away by what they can do.

Are there things they can’t do still? Yeah. But the things they can do are phenomenal.

I didn’t turn them around by myself. I’ve spent most of my life in Michigan, and I’ve been employed by General Motors, but I didn’t have any personal gain from this success other than the way it would affect my state and the community. I also saw how profoundly transformational this could all be and how different the business model was.

I was giving a lot of public speeches, and they just seemed to be in denial, not just the car guys but auto executives in general.

They kept saying it was a nice idea, but it was years away and there would always be a driver in the car. I credit that to a few things: Auto executives tend not to be schooled in computer science and what I call the digital economy. They tend to be either

GENERAL MOTORS LLC

finance people or marketing people or mechanical engineers.

Their plans are defined by how well the driver feels integrated into the car—a lot of work goes into what the acceleration feels like and what the steering feels like and what cornering and braking feel like. A lot of work goes into packing an engine and a transmission and an exhaust system. This is where the knowhow of the auto industry resides.

I think the pivotal moment was when Uber decided it was an existential threat to their business model if autonomous vehicles truly occurred. They hired the cream of the crop out of Carnegie Mellon’s robotics center. So they’re hiring all these people and here we have the auto industry still not believing this is happening. That’s what woke up a lot of people—the press coverage of what Uber had done. You had Google and you had Uber, both of which have much higher market capitalization than any of the individual auto companies, and suddenly, the car guys said they’ve got to get into this. You have to give them credit. They made several very good moves in my judgement since that awakening.

So how do you balance the revolution with consumers as this all moves forward? How do you get drivers, especially drivers who love the act of driving, to decide they’re going to buy in?

I understand people when they say they love driving but do people love commuting? Do they love getting stuck in traffic? Do they love the anxiety of getting to work on time with the traffic jam? When traffic starts to back up, I notice people start to reach for their cellphones and start sending texts.

When you begin to look at all the other aspects of car ownership and operation, the industry has taken assumption of what consumers will put up with. Do you like to shop for a car? Do you like to shop for insurance? Do you like to get gas and pay to maintain your car? Do you like to spend your time tethered to the wheel and have that time when you’re not enjoying the open road with the top down? Most consumers say they don’t like those experiences.

What we see now is a once-in-a-century chance to design a transportation service that gets rid of all those negatives and at lower cost than owning and operating a car, and it’s much safer.

People loved horses when Henry Ford came along, and people still love horses. No one is going to say you can’t drive your car. If you want to do all the things I just described and still drive your car, that’s fantastic. I suspect you’ll be asked to pay more insurance than what’s requested of autonomous cars because they’ll THE PARKING PROFESSIONAL | JANUARY 2019 | PARKING-MOBILITY.ORG 21

crash one-tenth as frequently or maybe one-one-­ hundredth as frequently as you’ll tend to crash.

What will convince you is when you get your first chance to take a ride in a truly autonomous car. You ride in those cars and you’re blown away by what they can do. Are there things they can’t do still? Yeah. But the things they can do are phenomenal.

I loved your story in the book of the first time you rode in an autonomous vehicle and your revelation that this was really amazing.

I first rode in it in late 2010, and now we’re eight years past that moment. All the additional things the car can do behind that first moment is phenomenal. But it has to do almost everything, so this is that 99.999 percent tale: If I told you your speech recognition system could identify 99 words out of 100, you’d say, “That’s pretty good. I think that’ll work.” But when we talk about a car, now, that 1 percent is pretty scary. What’s fascinating about this journey is that the time it took to go from zero to 90 percent was shorter than the time it took to go from 90 to 99 percent, and that’s proving to be shorter than the time it’s taken to go from 99 percent to 99.999 percent. This is quite a journey toward nearly perfect, and the progress has been remarkable. I think people are going to love the experience. I really do.

You talked a lot about the fact that this isn’t just about autonomous cars. This is about autonomous cars and electrification and mobility-as-a-service all coming together, which seems to say some of these arguments that it’s all going to make traffic worse may not actually be true?

There are a lot of people who can’t afford to own or operate a car or are too old or too young or not capable of owning a car. They don’t have the freedom to go where and when they want to like people who own and operate cars have. We’re going to provide transportation services that are better than car ownership has been. I suspect they’re going to make more trips, and you can argue that’s going to cause more congestion. When you get the crashes out of the system, when you get parking off the street, when you get traffic flowing in a much more uniform way, when you get the intersections, to be much smarter, we’re going to have improvements and we can handle more traffic, and we’ll have higher capacity.

The other thing that’s really important is that you may have read New York City is going to cap the number of Uber and Lyft drivers. That’s because they’re not optimizing fleet size. If you are in the business transportation services based on autonomous vehicles, you’re going to size your fleet to be optimized to be responsive to your customers, get to them quickly, have your utilization really high and your empty miles as low as possible. You’re not going to have these extra miles of vehicles driving around looking for business. With all of that combined, I think it’s going to be managed just fine.

I’d like to talk about unanticipated consequences— the ones we really believe are going to happen, like getting off of oil for transportation, eliminating 90 percent of crashes, and in your business, reducing the amount of land committed to parking, reducing the cost of travel by more than 50 percent and perhaps as much as 80 percent. Those anticipated consequences are very much worth going after.

People in our industry are shifting, watching this happen, from parking to parking and mobility. What do you think our members’ priorities should be to prepare themselves?

The traditional model of parking having to be adjacent to the destination is going to be disrupted considerably.

Think about parking for a Walmart store. I worked with developers to develop a piece of land in Florida—and

Larry Burns led a popular TED talk about the future of cars and transportation, available at ted.com.

22 THE PARKING PROFESSIONAL | JANUARY 2019 | PARKING-MOBILITY.ORG

Waymo’s fully self-driving Jaguar I-PACE electric SUV 4 WAYMO

There will be different locations for parking, and parking companies will be part of a different service ecosystem that involves recharging the vehicle and maintaining the vehicle. I arrive at work and my car goes to a place to wait for me; maybe it goes to get charged while it waits for me because it knows it needs to recharge. I think you’re going to see a lot of the charging happening in a depot-based terminal. it’s a really valuable piece of land—and part of it is a Walmart.

The parking lot for the Walmart is twice as big as the land for the store itself. People want the parking to be adjacent, and they want to park as close to the door as they can, and that type of parking assumption needs to be challenged.

Let’s say I have an autonomous vehicle. Maybe I didn’t buy it, but I’m leasing it for my own dedicated use. I ride from my home northwest of Detroit and the vehicle drops me off at the door of my office building in the downtown area. What happens to that vehicle now? It’s mine—it’s not part of a shared fleet. I’ll have a service standing behind me that will make the right decision on where my car goes and stages itself. Notice I’m using a different word than “parking.” So where does it go to wait for me? If it knows I’m going to be in my office for eight hours, it might go four or five miles away to find a place to stage that’s lower cost than

the parking garage next door. That tradeoff between the empty miles my vehicle might be willing to travel and the cost of my parking becomes very interesting.

Now, let’s say it makes a decision on where to stage itself, and in the middle of the day I realize I forgot to pick up my dry cleaning and I don’t want to hassle with it on the way home. So I send the vehicle to pick up my dry cleaning and when it picks me up at the end of my work day, my dry cleaning is there in the vehicle. And then an hour before I go home, I remember I don’t have anything at home for dinner and I decide to get Chinese take-out. So I send my car to get that. I might have even dispatched my car to pick up my wife or my mother in law to take them somewhere during the day.

So there’s this whole question of where does my car go to wait for me? I think it’s at the heart of the future of parking.

Then there’s the whole other part of this, which is a THE PARKING PROFESSIONAL | JANUARY 2019 | PARKING-MOBILITY.ORG 23

Parking is a really important part of this future story. A really important part.

People who have a stake in the industry need to anticipate what’s coming.

I think there will be some big winners, but I think there will be some big losers too. transportation service like Uber without a driver that spends most of its day moving people and isn’t going to park much. That’s going to fundamentally reduce the need for parking. An analysis in chapter 9 of my book suggests we can get by with 15 percent of the vehicles we have now if we use a shared model. So my premise for parking is No. 1, the need for parking is going to go down in line with the market share of the trips that are in shared vehicles; two, parking doesn’t have to be located next door; three, people are still going to be using dedicated vehicles that have to be parked but don’t have to be parked on the land or in the way they park now; and four, for cities that have a lot of street parking, sometimes that’s the second-biggest source of revenue for a city, so cities have to start thinking about that. I think you’re going to see a different kind of parking, which that is my car is parked instantaneously on the roadway for a second and I should pay for that. This whole concept of charging for a space a vehicle occupies, whether it’s moving or not moving, becomes very interesting as well.

I think there will be parking. There will be different locations for parking, and parking companies will be part of a different service ecosystem that involves recharging the vehicle and maintaining the vehicle. I arrive at work

and my car goes to a place to wait for me; maybe it goes to get charged while it waits for me because it knows it needs to recharge. I think you’re going to see a lot of the charging happening in a depot-based terminal.

Parking is a really important part of this future story.

A really important part. People who have a stake in the industry need to anticipate what’s coming. I think there will be some big winners, but I think there will be some big losers too. Commercial real estate developers realize the game is changing on parking, and new parking structures are being designed to convert to something else. The whole set of regulations on how many spaces do you need to put in place when you’re building condos or apartments is getting a lot of debate right now.

There’s also the debate over curb use. How do you share the curbs and manage them so everyone can use them for all of this dropping off and picking up along with other uses?

Hugely important question. People want to be picked up precisely and dropped off precisely. At a shopping center, maybe the driverless cars will stage to the side of a store instead of right at the door. They’re not parking right at the curb. Maybe there are a dozen spaces for autonomous vehicles to stage.

Waymo’s fully self-driving reference vehicle, Firefly 1

WAYMO

24 THE PARKING PROFESSIONAL | JANUARY 2019 | PARKING-MOBILITY.ORG

So here’s the million-dollar question: When is all of this going to happen?

It’s neat that you ask that because that’s a climactic point of my stump speech. I ask the audience how many think it’s a 2030 story, a 2025 story, or a 2020 story? The audience usually lands at 2025. I position it as a right now. I think the tipping point, the magical moment where the technology is proven to be real, the value customers get from the technology is proven to be real, the opportunity

Larry Burns to Keynote 2019 IPMI Conference & Expo Autonomous vehicle expert and author Larry Burns will keynote the 2019 IPMI Conference & Expo, talking about his book, his work in the field, and how parking and mobility professionals can prepare for the next generation of transportation. It’s an event you won’t want to miss. Visit IPIConference. parking.org to register!

ISTOCK/ NIKADA

to make money from that is proven to be real, and companies are allowing it, I think we’re in a three- to five-year window. You have to be preparing now. I think parking professionals need to be preparing now. Don’t bet the farm, but give that deep insight and take a look and understand what’s taking place and the shifts that are happening. Once the tipping point hits, the people who are involved in the industry are going to start thinking differently about those assets. There will be a dramatic impact on valuations.

The tipping point and that three-to-five-year window doesn’t mean everybody’s going to have an autonomous vehicle in that time. It means smart money is going to accept this at that point, and it’s going to influence asset values and land valuations in a big way. If you get behind that eight ball and you haven’t positioned yourself to know what you need to be doing, you’re going to be left behind. The biggest mistake is to anticipate it happens later and plan that it happens later, and it happens sooner. If you plan for it sooner and it happens later, at least you’re prepared.

When do I think you will have a chance to actually hit an app and ride in a driverless car? I think there’s a good chance given the importance of some cities, you’ll be able to hit an app and get this service in the 2025 to 2028 timeframe. Let’s say we wanted to provide 10 percent of the miles in the U.S. in a driverless, shared, electric vehicle. Over 50 percent of the people in the U.S. live in suburbs. So that’s 300 billion miles. That would mean about 4 million driverless, shared vehicles being used 75,000 miles a year. That sounds like a lot. But the U.S. auto industry is building 16 million vehicles a year so all I need to have is 25 percent of one year’s output in the U.S. industry to cover 10 percent of the miles. Very, very doable.

The next year or two are the final proof points of the technology, the regulators getting comfortable, and then you have to have the hardware that’s environmentally rigorous.

I think that’s very, very possible, and that’s why I think it’s a right-now story.

THE PARKING PROFESSIONAL | JANUARY 2019 | PARKING-MOBILITY.ORG 25

GETTING

WORD

OUT THE

BY BILL SMITH, APR

26 THE PARKING PROFESSIONAL | JANUARY 2019 | PARKING-MOBILITY.ORG

SHUTTERSTOCK/ VARIJANTA

The top marketing trends parking and mobility organizations need to know about in 2019.

W

ITH THE NEW YEAR UPON US, many parking and mobility leaders are taking

a fresh look at their marketing programs to assess what’s working and what needs refreshing. These are exciting times for marketing, and parking organizations can learn a lot about what they should—and shouldn’t—do from their peers.

Just as the parking and mobility world is being transformed by technology, so is marketing. Many of the most important trends revolve around technology. From social media to video marketing to public relations, all of these marketing approaches revolve around—or at least rely heavy on—technology. Even modern parking equipment itself is being used as a marketing tool! It’s a brave new world out there, and the most successful parking organizations know how to integrate technology into their marketing.

“Marketing has been largely revolutionized by the adoption of a wide range of new technology in the industry,” says Margarita Delgado, president of MRD Consulting, Inc. “This new paradigm needs to be communicated and marketed in ways that resonate with consumers for whom technology is their first language.

They want information on demand, right here and right now, in real time.”

Social Media

Everyone seems to be talking about social media, but many parking organizations struggle with it. The problem isn’t that social media doesn’t lend itself to promoting parking; it’s that many parking organizations, particularly older, more established ones, don’t fully understand how to use it most effectively.

According to social media guru Abbie McGilvery, founder of From The Nest, a social media consulting firm that helps organizations integrate social media into their marketing programs, “Marketing managers, particularly established pros with a lot of experience, often have trouble bridging the gap between the traditional marketing techniques and the new marketing reality.”

THE PARKING PROFESSIONAL | JANUARY 2019 | PARKING-MOBILITY.ORG 27

Social media marketing is about psychology.

It’s about knowing the needs and desires of your audience and knowing how and where to reach them. When you know how to connect with your audiences, it’s easy to build a strategy to reach them and make a lasting impression through social media.

These are new tools that require new skills, and the big mistake organizations make is asking their marketing staff to design and implement a social media strategy out of whole cloth. Instead, they should empower their marketers to bring in people with social media experience who can integrate social media programs into the organization’s existing marketing.

“Your program needs to focus on being social, telling stories about your firm, your people, and why they matter,” says McGilvery. “For many organizations, this can be scary.”

Social media strategies should revolve around sharing stories your audiences care about and relating them to your business. Don’t talk just about how you do parking, but also talk about the issues that everyone else in the industry is talking about and find ways to bring the conversation back to your organization. An effective social media strategy will help you make your organization more relevant to the industry.

Many organizations are starting to use more video in their social media strategies. Marketing is about telling stories, and videos can be tremendously powerful ways to tell stories.

And parking organizations have powerful stories to tell. For instance, videos that demonstrate how a parking technology works and benefits parkers can be extremely compelling. Or a video showing the design of a particularly impressive parking facility or one demonstrate how a downtown parking plan has benefited a community can tell stories that will appeal to many different audiences—and prospective customers. For municipal parking organizations or universities, a video illustrating parking resources can help users better utilize those resources. We live in a visual age, and having the ability to show people what you do and how it benefits them can be extraordinarily powerful.

28 THE PARKING PROFESSIONAL | JANUARY 2019 | PARKING-MOBILITY.ORG

These types of videos can obviously be posted via traditional social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Many parking organizations are also creating their own YouTube channels where they can post videos demonstrating their capabilities and programs—and tell their stories. The links to these videos can be a prominent part of your social media program.

In fact, whole campaigns can be built around the stories organizations tell through their videos and post on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and other social media and networking platforms.

“Social media marketing is about psychology,” says McGilvery. “It’s about knowing the needs and desires of your audience and knowing how and where to reach them. When you know how to connect with your audiences, it’s easy to build a strategy to reach them and make a lasting impression through social media.”

Public Relations

When digital media first began to appear in the mid1990s, conventional wisdom was that public relations didn’t have a future and that PR practitioners were doomed. The expectation was that traditional outlets, particularly print media, would be pushed aside by online media. Those predictions turned out to be extraordinarily off-base.

In fact, PR has flourished since the advent of digital media. Many of the outlets that dominated the landscape prior to the digital age started their own online versions. At the same time, many new digital media outlets began to pop up to provide both general news and targeted industry-focused information.

As a result, rather than killing traditional public relations, the digital age caused PR to flourish.

Public relations is still the best way to reach huge numbers of people, all at once. An article in a national outlet can reach thousands, tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of readers. Unlike advertising, where ad space is purchased, stories in newspapers, magazines, and online publications, as well as on TV and radio, don’t cost anything beyond the time and resources required to arrange and complete them. In addition to being cost-effective, stories arranged in print, broadcast, and online media also carry much more weight and credibility than ads.

And because most stories run online, even when they are published in magazines or newspapers, they are more versatile as marketing tools. It’s easy to post

SHUTTERSTOCK/ VARIJANTA

links to articles on a website or plaster them across social media platforms. Digital articles can also be turned into the focus of direct mail programs utilizing electronic newsletter services such as Mailchimp, Constant Contact, and Emma.

Technology has also made life easier for PR practitioners and in-house PR staff. Back in the dark ages (the 20th century), we had to do everything by hand, building media lists from resource books that were updated annually and hoping the lists were relatively up-to-date. Today, we have powerful databases that can build lists of media who cover individual topics (such as parking) and which are constantly updated. Those media databases also typically offer a distribution function, allowing us to distribute press releases, pitch letters, and other PR materials directly to the editors and reporters who comprise a particular media list.

No longer do we have to print out individual letters or releases and mail or fax them to key media.

Just as technology has transformed parking, it has also made public relations much more effective and accessible for parking organizations. Whether organizations turn to outside PR practitioners or manage their public relations in-house, PR should be part of every parking organization’s marketing program.

Unconventional Uses for Technology

One intriguing emerging marketing trend revolves around parking technology. Many of the technologies that have become ubiquitous in recent years also provide additional marketing benefits.

Perhaps the most obvious example is the LED matrix signage that’s part of a parking guidance system. The signs are intended to let drivers know how many spaces are available in a facility or on a particular floor or row. To serve their purpose they must be easily legible from far away since the people reading them are on the move in their cars.

The signs also provide the perfect medium to promote a brand. They can easily be customized to display a logo or slogan adjacent to the information about how many parking spaces are available at the moment. And messaging can be changed whenever the owner wants.

“For years, parking owners have customized their signs with their logos,” says Dale Fowler, President of INDECT USA. “Now, though, owners are starting to use the signs to promote special events or other services or initiatives. For instance, a university can advertise upcoming campus events, or parking facilities that serve local sporting or entertainment events can promote those events on their signs.”

The signs placed outside at garage entrances are particularly versatile. Matrix signs are available in larger sizes than ever, and that provides more opportunity for complex messaging, while still leaving plenty of room for occupancy information.

“Matrix signs are essentially huge TVs,” says Fowler. “Owners can use their signs for all types of messaging and can even sell advertising. The technology provides a terrific opportunity for

parking owners to generate new revenue by selling advertising and broadcasting it right on their facilities.”

Modern access and revenue control equipment can also provide advertising opportunities. In recent months, the first video-enabled parking access and revenue control system (PARCS) equipment has been introduced to the marketplace. This equipment features customizable video screens that can be tailored to the individual needs of the facility it serves. Some owners may choose to provide payment instructions, while others may offer facility maps to help drivers find their way out of the garage and to their ultimate destination. Still others may choose to sell advertising to local merchants or other organizations.

“For the first time, it’s possible for parking owners to monetize their access and revenue control equipment,” says Waldemar Batistella, national product portfolio manager for SKIDATA. “The video technology was developed to make the PARCS equipment more useful and user friendly, but as a marketing tool it also offers exciting new opportunities.”

A third parking technology, parking pre-booking software, combines the power of technology with old-school direct marketing. When drivers book and pay for a space, the system collects data about the trip, most notably when they are arriving.

This information can then be used to send highly targeted marketing messages to the drivers’ smartphones or other devices.

The parking owner can partner with local businesses to offer drivers discounts and targeted services to local retailers, restaurants, and other businesses.

“An important marketing benefit of pre-booking technology is that it allows the owner to collect customer data,” says Stephen Prati of Chauntry Ltd. “The platform really tells you everything you need to know about customers and their plans, and that information can be used to send them special offers, discounts, and validation offers in real time.”

New Tools

Anyone who has been in parking for a long time has witnessed many amazing and exciting changes, and many of those advances are the result of technology. Just as technology is constantly improving parking, the same is true of marketing. For parking organizations that are reevaluating their marketing for 2019, their focus should be on technology and how to apply it, particularly in social media marketing and public relations.

BILL SMITH, APR, is principal of Smith-Phillips Strategic

Communications and contributing editor to The Parking Professional. He can be reached at bsmith@smith-phillips. com.

THE PARKING PROFESSIONAL | JANUARY 2019 | PARKING-MOBILITY.ORG 29

Training Future Parking Industry

Future industry leaders get a jumpstart through the City of Virginia Beach’s apprenticeship program.

30 THE PARKING PROFESSIONAL | JANUARY 2019 | PARKING-MOBILITY.ORG

Leaders

By Robert Fries, CAPP

Management apprenticeship programs offer new options.

A

PRACTICAL WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT STRATEGY is vital to optimizing any organization’s talent and performance. The parking industry is no different, whether it’s a municipality, university, airport, hospital, or corporate operator. All similar industries in the local market compete for the same labor pool, which can make employee recruitment and retention difficult. An organization’s human resources deficiencies cannot always be resolved by attracting out-of-market job applicants with exceptional credentials to fill vacant positions.

The City of Virginia Beach, Va., has an oceanfront parking program designed primarily to accommodate local and regional residents and out-of-area day trippers. Like most oceanfront and resort towns, visitation is seasonal with peak use in July. The seasonality makes recruiting and hiring a significant challenge because we are competing with other resort businesses for the same labor pool that has the same peaks in their businesses as we have. Placing a simple employment ad in a news publication is just like baiting a hook and waiting for fish to bite. There are other methods to attract quality applicants to fill critical positions.

Layered Strategy

In response to the challenges of cyclical recruiting and hiring of employees each season, Virginia Beach worked to develop a layered workforce development strategy to recruit, train, motivate, and develop personnel. Because the staffing level within the parking management office is small, the best approach to accomplishing our goals of crafting a practical workforce development program was to create strategic partnerships with many entities to attract qualified applicants

and to optimize workforce talent.

The best approach to These practical strategies can act as a blueprint and be easily replicated accomplishing our goals by other parking organizations. of crafting a practical The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) operates a program called workforce development Apprenticeship USA in conjunction with each state’s labor depart- program was to create ments. An apprenticeship is a paid strategic partnerships with work program that accompanies an educational component demany entities to attract signed to develop a community’s workforce. It is a typical earnqualified applicants and to and-learn program that provides essential on-the-job training while optimize workforce talent. providing structured education.

The structured education component can be accommodated by qualified community colleges, four-year universities, or technical schools. According to the DOL’s website, the national average wage for a fully proficient apprentice is $60,000 annually.

The on-the-job training requirements can range between 2,000 and 10,000 hours depending on the skill mastery required by each apprenticeship. Each state THE PARKING PROFESSIONAL | JANUARY 2019 | PARKING-MOBILITY.ORG 31

may have established minimum standards for apprenticeship. For example, Virginia’s Department of Labor and Industry (VDOLI) sets a minimum of 144 hours of related classroom instruction. Many of the established apprenticeships focus on trade skills with the usual positions of electricians, welders, and pipe fitters; however, there is a growing trend to reach beyond trade positions, and some states offer tax credits to employers who hire apprentices or offer tuition support for the apprentices themselves. The end result is a well-trained worker with a degree who has a mastery of the knowledge and skills required by the employing organization as well as some benefits from the state government.

In 2015, Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe signed Executive Order 49 to provide support and funding for registered apprenticeships for programs in the private and public sector occupations in which there have not been traditional apprentices. VDOLI may reimburse each employer up to $1,000 annually per apprentice.

The governor signed this executive order to help replace more than 930,000 workers who will retire by the year 2022. As many as 50 to 65 percent of those jobs will be technical and trade positions.

Developing a Curriculum

Presented with this unique opportunity and the need to find qualified candidates each resort season, the City of Virginia Beach parking management office collaborated

32 THE PARKING PROFESSIONAL | JANUARY 2019 | PARKING-MOBILITY.ORG

with its parking management contractor, Republic Parking Systems, to research the requirements of the apprentice program and develop a useful curriculum to custom-fit the city’s needs. Republic Parking Systems became an official sponsor for the registered apprenticeship program in Virginia after working with VDOLI to develop the minimum standards for our apprenticeship program. The result was the nation’s first parking management apprenticeship. Once an apprentice position is created, it can be used anywhere across the nation.

The City of Virginia Beach and Republic Parking decided the on-the-job training component will require 4,000 hours to complete. The apprentice is hired as a lead supervisor and finishes as an assistant facility manager after the 4,000 hours of job training is complete. To provide some local perspective, the assistant facility manager is a hands-on position that learns and eventually masters every aspect of the parking operation. Almost everyone in parking leadership roles in Virginia Beach held this position at one time in their careers. Each organization that has a registered apprentice program can customize its own work process training program to suit its unique needs.

Virginia Beach’s on-the-job training component is comprised of: ■■ General Parking Knowledge. This training provides a baseline understanding of the skills needed to manage daily parking operations and how the city’s

parking program works, as well as the performance expectations of the city’s parking management office.

■■ Audit and Revenue Control. These skills are the nuts and bolts of any parking program. Successful managers need strong skills to reconcile daily revenue collections, understand the separation of duties, and gain fundamental knowledge of cash handling and control. This component of training has the most hours dedicated to it. It makes up 25 percent of all of the on-the-job training curriculum of the Virginia Beach apprentice program.

■■ Operating Parking Equipment. Understanding parking access and revenue control systems, multispace meters, single-space meters, handheld pointof-sales devices, gates, cameras, and parking citation writing devices are the tools required to perform the job. The apprentices are trained in how to operate these devices and taught why the devices are needed to successfully operate a parking program.

■■ Parking Operations. All parking programs are different and are often unique to the specific location and organizational goals. In Virginia Beach, the apprentices get to experience the challenges of operating a system that may park a few thousand

Management apprentices learn everything from textbook theory to hands-on skills.

vehicles one day and then 13,000 vehicles the next day for a special event. They learn how to schedule staffing for these events, troubleshoot equipment malfunctions, learn techniques to maximize a lot or garage’s occupancy, and address customer concerns in the field. They also learn how to manage frequent parkers, hotel guest parking, residential parking, and special-use passes such as seasonal or weekly passes for a lot or garage.

■■ Customer Service. When it comes to parking, customers can be demanding and emotional. The apprentices receive training and instruction from

THE PARKING PROFESSIONAL | JANUARY 2019 | PARKING-MOBILITY.ORG 33

Combining both organizations’ goals was an easy fit that culminated in a win-win scenario.

TCC has another outlet to direct its students toward a career, and Virginia Beach and Republic Parking have access to individuals of all ages and backgrounds eager to work and improve their lives. This proactive strategy eliminates the unpredictability of the traditional hiring and recruiting process. several sources on how to be empathetic and actively listen to a customer’s needs or complaints.

Complaints can range from not being able to access a full garage during an event to receiving a parking citation or even paying an extra $2 at the garage exit gate because the exit line was long and the wait time caused the hourly increment to increase to the next paid hour by a few minutes. Apprentices are trained in how to explain the rationale of parking rules and how to de-escalate hostile customers. The apprentices are also trained on how to be proactive, friendly helpful ambassadors ready to help parking patrons with answers to basic tourist questions.

■■ Management. This part of the training gives the apprentices experience in hiring techniques and evaluating the skill set of potential employees. The apprentices also train new employees on how to perform their jobs properly and explain the organizational culture and expectations. This training allows them to develop and hone leadership skills that will be required to earn future promotions or even find parking management jobs with other organizations.

A College Partnership

Virginia Beach partnered with Tidewater Community College (TCC) to accomplish several workforce development objectives that included designing the classroom instruction component and creating the on-the-job training criteria. Tidewater Community College has four campuses spread through the South Hampton Roads region with more than 31,000 students

34 THE PARKING PROFESSIONAL | JANUARY 2019 | PARKING-MOBILITY.ORG

enrolled. With the assistance of TCC, the city selected the academic criteria for its business administration degree as the classroom instruction. All of the classes offered with this degree will transfer to any four-year institution in Virginia. Selecting this degree allows apprentices an easy pathway to obtaining a bachelor’s degree after the apprentice program is completed. At the end of the apprenticeship, successful candidates who complete all of the requirements are then placed in management positions.

One of the great benefits of partnering with TCC was its internal promotion of the new program to their 31,000 motivated students. In effect, TCC has become a direct pipeline for placing employees in management positions. Its students are attending college to start and develop their careers. The City of Virginia Beach is looking for qualified candidates to fill positions.

Combining both organizations’ goals was an easy fit that culminated in a win-win scenario. TCC has another outlet to direct its students toward a career, and Virginia Beach and Republic Parking have access to individuals of all ages and backgrounds eager to work and improve their lives. This proactive strategy eliminates the unpredictability of the traditional hiring and recruiting process. When a vacancy needs to be filled, Republic Parking contacts TCC’s apprenticeship program coordinator to announce the opening and TCC alerts its students about the opportunity.

Developing a Model

The City of Virginia Beach parking management apprenticeship program can be used as a model by any parking organization in any city. To initiate the program, reach out to your state’s department of labor and inquire about how to start a registered apprenticeship program. If other organizations create their own programs, the future of the parking industry will strengthen and continue to grow professionally. In Virginia Beach, we believe that we are creating future leaders in the parking industry.

ROBERT FRIES, CAPP, is parking manager with

the City of Virginia Beach, Va. He can be reached at rfries@vbgov.com.

2018

International Parking & Mobility Institute

Year in Review 2018 MARKED ANOTHER SIGNIFICANT YEAR

for IPMI and its members as the association continued to provide industry-leading opportunities, education, and support for parking, mobility, and transportation professionals. Our members are generous with their time and their hearts—and this year was no different. From topical trainings to meaningful networking events, IPMI offered more opportunities than ever to connect with colleagues and resources.

Take a look back at the activities and efforts that shaped an extraordinary year and see what’s on the horizon for 2019—we can’t wait to get started.

New Name, Same Great Mission

In 2018, the International Parking Institute (IPI) changed its name to the International Parking & Mobility Institute (IPMI). The new name reflects the interconnectedness of parking, transportation, and mobility industries and the expanded role of parking and transportation professionals. IPMI will roll out additional changes that reflect this important distinction in the coming year.

Welcome to IPMI Online IPMI’s website and social media accounts continue to be key resources for the parking and mobility community. Update your bookmarks to parkingmobility.org and follow us at @IPMInow.

From the Board of Directors I hope your 2018 was as exciting as it was for all of the IPMI volunteers and staff who make this organization so effective.

We are very proud of our accomplishments during the last 12 months and excited for the upcoming year. Thank you for all of your support and commitment to IPMI!

Roamy R. Valera, CAPP

Chair, IPMI Board of Directors CEO, North America, PayByPhone

Meet Our Trainers

Professional Development Online Learning

IPMI’s list of online learning opportunities expanded to nearly 20, with the latest additions including a course on Off-Street Parking and the Parksmart Sustainability Solutions Series, Elements 1-4.

Along with interactive webinars, taking an IPMI online course is the easiest and best way to enter, advance, and excel in the rapidly evolving parking profession. These courses provide essential information in an easily digested format and offer valuable CAPP points and CEUs. IPMI is an accredited Authorized Provider by the International Association for Continuing Education and Training (IACET) and authorized to offer IACET CEUs for programs that qualify under the ANSI/ IACET Standard.

Onsite Training

IPMI’s onsite training program brings engaging and invaluable training right to your office. IPMI’s team of training and development specialists trained thousands of professionals from the municipal, academic, airport, commercial operator, hospital, supplier, and consultant sectors. Topics include conflict resolution, customer service, tactical communications, and parking industry fundamentals. Intended for everyone from frontline staff to seasoned managers. Learn more and book a session at ­parking-mobility.org/education.

IPMI training specialists provide onsite professional development for everyone from frontline staff to seasoned managers.

CINDY CAMPBELL is IPMI’s senior training and

development specialist. With over 35 years of experience in law enforcement, parking, and transportation services, she brings comprehensive industry knowledge and professional experience to the IPMI training program.

MATT PENNEY is the director of parking and

transportation services for Baylor University in Waco, Texas. He has been in the parking and transportation industry for the past 16 years.

ANA HENGIST is a trainer from Brazil, with over 13

years of experience, including eight years in the U.S. with customer service and professional development.

WANDA BROWN, MBA, served on IPMI’s Board of

Directors from 2008 to 2015, representing the interest of hospitals and medical centers. She spent 17 years as assistant manager for parking, transportation, and fleet services at U.C. Davis Medical Center.

KIM E. JACKSON, CAPP, provides leadership,

expertise, and management for university transportation and parking operations, services, facilities, and programs. She is the director of transportation and parking services for Princeton University and was previously chair of IPMI’s Board of Directors.

36 THE PARKING PROFESSIONAL | JANUARY 2019 | PARKING-MOBILITY.ORG

Resources & Publications IPMI’s Forum Online Community Launched

Forum is IPMI’s new online, members-only network that helps parking and mobility professionals find answers, access industry information, join discussions, and forge valuable relationships. It’s a powerful tool that’s free to use, private,

and moderated, so you can feel confident about jumping into chat threads and tapping into the robust library of member knowledge and resources. Our members love the quick, informative responses and how easy it is to become an active user. If you’re an IPMI member, you’re already registered in the Forum—log in with your IPMI username and password at forum.parking-mobility.org.

Daily Blog

IPMI members contributed hundreds of blog posts throughout the year, providing short, timely updates on industry news and ideas. Writing for the blog is an IPMI member benefit, offering a unique way to learn from and reach thousands of your peers, share your perspectives, and gain professional visibility.

Tracking Industry Trends 2018 Emerging Trends in Parking Report on a survey conducted by the International Parking Institute

It’s All About the Curb

A Guide to Parking Textbook

Published in 2018 and quick to become the authoritative textbook for the industry, A Guide to Parking surveys the current state of parking, providing an overview of major areas of parking, transportation, and mobility, punctuated by brief program examples. Get your copy—and copies for your staff—at amazon.com.

New lifestyles put transportation and mobility center-stage, shining a spotlight on curb management, alternative commuting methods, and parking.

IPMI’s 2018 Emerging Trends Survey explored where the industry stands on important issues such as electric and autonomous vehicles, ridesharing services, parking guidance systems, and the future of transportation and mobility.

parking.org

IPMI Newsletters

IPMI revamped its e-­newsletters to keep members even more informed and in-the-know. The IPMI Insider is published twice a month and now features member news releases, RFPs, and CareerHQ postings, as well as industry and association highlights. Once a month, get access to the digital version of the magazine. Moving Forward offers valuable professional development updates each month, including micro-learning video segments.

Resource Center

The IPMI website offers a wealth of information. A recent IPMI member survey found that 96 percent of members visit parking-mobility.org frequently. Search the Resource Center—a robust database of tools, events, case studies, research, in-depth publications, and networking opportunities.

THE PARKING PROFESSIONAL | JANUARY 2019 | PARKING-MOBILITY.ORG 37

IPMI Partnerships Accessible Parking Coalition

The IPMI-led Accessible Parking Coalition (APC) made major strides in 2018 by issuing the results of its first national survey on accessible parking among people with disabilities. Another landmark accomplishment was the launch of accessibleparkingcoalition.org, which serves as a collaborative resource center. A national public relations campaign is planned for 2019.

Alliance for Parking Data Standards

associations to share information with their international counterparts. The sixth annual GPALs Summit met in Orlando, Fla., during the IPMI’s 2018 Conference & Expo to discuss data, mobility, and parking management.

Smart City Expo World Congress

IPMI partnered with the Smart City Expo World Congress (SCEWC)—the leading international event on smart cities—to host a conference in Barcelona, Spain about sustainable and livable urban environments.

Formed in 2018, the Alliance for Parking Data Standards—whose members include IPMI, the British Parking Association, and the European Parking Association—aims to develop a uniform global standard for parking data that will allow organizations to share parking data across platforms and around the world.

State & Regional Associations (SRAs)

Global Parking Association Leaders

IPMI and the United States Green Building Council (USGBC) partner to offer sustainable building programs, such as Parksmart certification and Parksmart Advisor training.

Global Parking Association Leaders (GPALs)—established by IPMI as a group of international parking leaders from more than 30 countries—provides an opportunity for parking

IPMI partners nationwide with affiliated state and regional associations representing the parking, transportation, and mobility community. IPMI and the SRAs collaborate to provide excellent education, marketing, and networking opportunities at events, as well as share best practices throughout the year.

United States Green Building Council

Conferences that Build Community IPMI Conference & Expo

IPMI’s 2018 Conference & Expo in Orlando, Fla.—once again the largest gathering for our industry—brought together thousands of parking, transportation, and mobility professionals from around the world for four days of topnotch professional development, learning, and networking.

Attendees benefited from the Expo’s wealth of leadingedge products, technologies, and suppliers not seen elsewhere. Mixed in were plenty of opportunities for old-fashioned fun and catching up with new and old friends. A highlight of every Conference are the IPMI Awards and there were plenty of people, projects, and programs to recognize. The 2018 Parking

38 THE PARKING PROFESSIONAL | JANUARY 2019 | PARKING-MOBILITY.ORG

Solutions competition brought together four finalist collegiate teams to compete for the best vision of parking of the future.

In the end, Carnegie Mellon took the grand prize for the team’s flexible, Pittsburgh-specific garage of the future.

Leadership Summit

IPMI’s Leadership Summit, a unique professional development event limited to 100 established and emerging leaders, once again delivered an engaging, retreat-style learning experience. The two-day event included teambuilding, presentations by seasoned experts, and even a game-night mixer. Look for registration details for the 2019 Leadership Summit, Oct. 3–4, Pittsburgh, Pa., soon.

Certifications of Success CAPP

IPMI launched the CAPP Mentor Program, a vibrant matching of current, active CAPPs with members who have a strong interest in earning the CAPP credential. The CAPP Mentor Program strengthens leadership skills and supports future industry leaders as they prepare to become CAPP credentialed. Kicking off with an orientation session and following up regularly with check-ins throughout the year, the program is continually growing with new features.

The CAPP Job Analysis Committee met to review the knowledge, skills, and abilities every CAPP should possess.

The findings were used to build a jobs survey sent to all members, and the results will be the basis of a revised CAPP exam in fall 2019.

APO

Accredited Parking Organization (APO) is a designation for parking organizations that have achieved a comprehensive standard of excellence. E ­ leven parking organizations

earned accreditation or accreditation with distinction in 2018.

APO Site Reviewer Renewal Training is now offered as an online training for those looking to refresh their skills.

Parksmart

Parksmart certification recognizes sustainable parking structures, and Parksmart Advisors consult and guide organizations through the process. IPMI created a new Parksmart Advisor class that uses a flipped classroom experience, where interactive narratives and evidence simulate parts of the Parksmart certification application.

Want to add Parksmart Advisor to your resume? Join IPMI for online, instructor-led trainings offered throughout the year at parking-­mobility. org/parksmart-advisor.

Above and Beyond #IPMI2019 Sails into Anaheim

Save the date for the 2019 IPMI Conference & Expo, June 9–12, in Anaheim, Calif. IPMI will bring the education, expertise, technology, trends, networking, and more— you bring the sunscreen! Save when you register before Feb. 15, 2019. Visit IPIConference. parking.org for details.

Looking Forward

2019 is shaping up to be another year full of opportunity. Take advantage of IPMI’s offerings by responding to the Call for Volunteers this summer—our involved members are what make IPMI the welcoming community it is. Mark your calendar for the 2019 Leadership Summit, and get your passport ready for the International Parking & Mobility Conference in São Paulo, Brazil—both coming in fall 2019.

Thanks to You

IPMI is grateful for the many dedicated members of the parking, transportation, and mobility community who support, lead, and strengthen the association.

IPMI’s greatest resource is truly its numerous and talented volunteers.

Visit p ­ arking-mobility.org for more ways to make the next year an even more productive one.

THE PARKING PROFESSIONAL | JANUARY 2019 | PARKING-MOBILITY.ORG 39

11110010101011010110000101010001000100100001 000100101010101011101100101010100010100100101 000100101001000101010110011110101010101010101 101011110101010100100100101010100010100101010 1001010100101010000010000100101010010101001 010111001010100101001010110110010101100100100 1010101001010010010001001010101001010000010 010101111010011001010101001010100100001010010 1010010100101001001010001001010000010010101 111010100101010010010000010010011111001010010 0001010101010010100101010100101111101110110101 0101001011101000100101010010010010010010000 00010111111010101111101010101110100010100101010 10111111010101010101001000101101011111010101001 00101010101010101010010101010010100100101000 001001010110111110101010000101001000101010101 00100101001010101001010101001010100101010101 000001010100101010101010110110110010100101010 01010100010101111111011101111010101010110101010 101010101011110101010001010101000101001010010 00101001110101010100100101010001010101010010 10100101111110101111001011010111010110010010100 10100101000000100100100100101010010111100101 0101101011000010101000100010010000100010010 101010101110110010101010001010010010100010010 1001000101010110011110101010101010101101011110 10101010010010010101010001010010101010010101 0010101000001000010010101001010100101011100 101010010100101011011001010110010010010101010 01010010010001001010101001010000010010101111 01001100101010100101010010000101001010100101 Open IP is the future 00101001001010001001010000010010101111010100 of parking and mobility tech.

10101001001000001001001111100101001000010101 0101001010010101010010111110111011010101010010 11101000100101010010010010010010000000101111 110101011111010101011101000101001010101011111101 010101010100100010110101111101010100100101010 1010101010100101010100101001001010000010010 101101111101010100001010010001010101010010010 10010101010010101010010101001010101010000010 101001010101010101101101100101001010100101010 001010111111101110111101010101011010101010101010 10111101010100010101010001010010100100010100 111010101010010010101000101010101001010100101 1111101011110010110101110101100010010001001010 010101010101110101001001001000100101 0100100 01001010010101010101110101001001001000100101

Opening Up Parking Management Technology

40 THE PARKING PROFESSIONAL | JANUARY 2019 | PARKING-MOBILITY.ORG

OPINION

By Gorm Tuxen

A

S THE PARKING INDUSTRY HAS GROWN

more technology-centric in recent years, software has become increasingly important. Today, the industry revolves around technology. Owners and operators rely on parking access and revenue control systems to manage payments and access to and from their facilities; they use smart meters and pay-onfoot equipment to make it easier for patrons to pay while cutting down on theft and fraud; and parking guidance systems direct drivers to open spaces while providing invaluable utilization data for owners and operators to better manage their parking assets. We are in the midst of a glorious technology age that is transforming the parking industry in ways that were unimaginable just a few short years ago.

As exciting as this trend is for the industry, we still have a long way to go. While we have seen many new innovative equipment offerings in recent years, the industry has lagged when it comes to open data integration. We may be taking giant leaps when it comes to hardware, but we are taking baby steps when it comes to making related software and firmware open to allow the data from these various database platforms to be shared in a non-­ restricted fashion.

How often have you heard stories about shiny new equipment being introduced to the industry—equipment with all kinds of bells and whistles—that ends up stumbling out of the gate and not performing as expected? When this happens, the problem can often be traced back to a lack of understanding of the unique mechanical requirements facing equipment being deployed for public use, closely followed by the inability to develop relevant software and properly monitor and address ongoing failures of the equipment in the field. Nowhere is this more evident than in the area of wireless parking sensors, for instance. Sure, growing pains are to be expected with anything new, but there may be a larger issue at play here: Companies that are great at coming up with ideas for exciting new types of hardware often aren’t as good at developing the operational software that’s needed to support it.

THE PARKING PROFESSIONAL | JANUARY 2019 | PARKING-MOBILITY.ORG 41

Developing Something New

This is how the process typically works: Really smart people come up with an idea for a technology that can provide extraordinary benefits to parking owners and/or parkers. They get partners together (or if they already work at a parking technology company, perhaps they start a new division), and they get started on building an early prototype that includes all the bells and whistles. What’s next? They need to find software developers, and in many cases specialized manufacturers, to bring the concept to marFor parking’s technology age to ket. These developers and manufacturers may or truly soar, our industry will need to may not know parkembrace the principle of open data sharing, ing, and their ability through which third-party developers who to create relevant software and manuare deeply familiar with the information facture durable hardmanagement needs and parking challenges ware will be limited facing owners and operators are permitted to by their experience create software that will improve and expertise. It’s inevitable that something the operation—and ultimately the will get lost in translation. value—of their equipment.

It’s not the fault of the technology company overseeing the project or the software developers and manufacturers they hire. It’s just the nature of the beast. Any closed ecosystem is limited by the skills, knowledge, and experience of its people.

For parking’s technology age to truly soar, our industry will need to embrace the principle of open data sharing, through which third-party developers who are deeply familiar with the information management needs and parking challenges facing owners and operators are permitted to create software that will improve the operation—and ultimately the value—of their equipment. This will also facilitate the customization of the technology to better meet the needs of individual installations.

In addition, the parking industry will need to embrace third-party systems monitoring to provide the end users with comprehensive tools and services, which can be consolidated across many various

42 THE PARKING PROFESSIONAL | JANUARY 2019 | PARKING-MOBILITY.ORG

The beauty of the open IP approach—beyond improving the operations of a single piece of equipment or technology suite—is that it encourages sharing among parking organizations and their technology gurus (either on-staff or consultants).

hardware platforms, to truly allow the parking market to choose “best of breed” solutions without dependence on one particular brand or type of parking technology.

What Is Open IP?

Open IP (open internet protocol) is a communications protocol that allows for the open sharing of data between software from disparate developers or manufactures.

The data sharing is facilitated through the use of a secure application program interface (API), which allows two or more different software packages to share data from their databases through the internet. The API follows certain standard protocols and contains the data that one system is designed to share with another.

At no time do the software systems impact the operating software of the other connected systems, which offers each developer control over the integrity of their own system, without introducing unknown code or code changes that could make it hard for the end user to clearly identify who to contact for support.

The beauty of the open IP approach—beyond improving the operations of a single piece of equipment or technology suite—is that it encourages sharing among parking organizations and their technology gurus (either on-staff or consultants). As a result, organizations can explore, experiment, and share the results of those experiments to create innovative new ways to utilize different types of equipment.

What Is Third-Party Systems Monitoring?

Third-party system monitoring uses the principle of Open IP data sharing. However, in addition to sharing operational data across an API, diagnostics data from multiple hardware systems can also be shared and further analyzed to create a real-time dashboard to allow for the connected equipment to be monitored and supervised. Equipment failures, wireless system disconnects, battery replacements, paper stock, or revenue collection requirements, to mention a few, can be monitored and prioritized from one central point.

Knowledge is Power.

Shared Knowledge is‌ Ad Name 43

MAGIC The Parking Professional is IPMI’s award-winning monthly magazine, featuring articles and insights from industry experts on the latest in technology, design, and management. If your company is an IPMI member, your entire staff receives a digital subscription.

Read now at parking-mobility.org.

Not as Scary as It Sounds

Understandably, many technology companies are hesitant to just hand over access to data from their integrated parking systems data platform or hardware for anyone to mess around with. After all, when you’ve invested a lot of money to develop a system, a piece of equipment, or a data platform you think will revolutionize the way we park, do you really want anyone messing with it?

However, that is the wrong way to look at it. The technology innovators’ payoff in developing new tools comes from seeing their brainchild get widely adopted and extensively used. When parking owners adapt technology to better meet their unique needs, they are more likely to buy that technology (and buy more units and data as their needs grow) and tell their peers about the benefits that they are deriving from the technology.

The other supporting aspect to data and operations sharing is the rapid pace with which new technologies are being introduced. The parking industry, after many years of running behind the technology curve, is seeing a host of new and exiting hardware, services, and concepts being introduced. Many of these are open internet-based concepts. The lines between hardware, software, and services are being blurred and will become increasingly virtual in the future.

This means shorter shelf life for each individual solution, and success will be achieved through adaptation and integration of third-party solutions. It will take a village, not just one organization or a few legacy companies, to build the future.

Win-Win-Win

Open data sharing provides a win-win-win scenario for parking organizations using equipment parking technology companies and the parking industry itself.

Parking organizations using technology and improving their parking software themselves are the obvious winners. No longer will they be constrained by software designed to manage generic parking facilities or parking facilities in other industries. Does it make sense, for instance, for a university’s equipment to be run with software created for airports or municipal parking structures? Doesn’t it make a lot more sense to use

44 THE PARKING PROFESSIONAL | JANUARY 2019 | PARKING-MOBILITY.ORG

Open data sharing provides a win-winwin scenario for parking organizations using equipment parking technology companies and the parking industry itself.

Parking organizations using technology and improving their parking software themselves are the obvious winners.

software that can be customized to meet the unique needs of an individual parking owner and for that software to be able to evolve as the owner’s needs change?

Technology providers and manufacturers benefit from open data sharing because by encouraging innovative—and perhaps, experimental—minds to find ways to make their data work better, they improve their own products. Few companies could afford to hire a building full of software development stars, but through open sourcing, companies don’t just get access to a building full of stars, but a world full of them. And it doesn’t cost a penny.

Finally, the parking industry itself benefits because an open data-sharing platform encourages the brightest minds in software development to apply their skills to parking management challenges and solutions. Our industry has profited tremendously from all of the bright (in many cases, young) professionals who have migrated to parking from other industries or who have come to parking straight out of school, and an open data-sharing environment would merely accelerate that trend.

GORM TUXEN is president/CEO of IPsens, LLC.

He can be reached at gorm.tuxen@ipsens.net.

How Do You Transform a Tangled Web of Parking Data Terminology into One Cohesive, International Standard?

The new Alliance for Parking Data Standards, founded by the International Parking & Mobility Institute, the British Parking Association, and the European Parking Association, is developing a global standard for parking data that will allow organizations to share parking data across platforms worldwide.

Documents are available for download today. Visit our website and subscribe for updates.

parking.org/apds THE PARKING PROFESSIONAL | JANUARY 2019 | PARKING-MOBILITY.ORG  45

IN

short

Highlights from the IPMI Blog

ARE YOU AN EFFECTIVE ADMINISTRATOR? LOOK IN THE MIRROR

By Jason M. Jones

The simple definition of micromanage is to “control every part, however small, of an enterprise or activity.” Many administrators, including me, are guilty of this more often than we think even if we don’t mean to be this way. We want everything to be perfect but at what cost to the organization?

Getting involved in everyday details is not an effective or healthy way to manage. Sure, not everyone communicates information, policies, and procedures the way we would, but empowering people to make decisions on their own is much more positive in the long term. Having employees wonder if they are making the right or wrong decision doesn’t allow the employee, or organization as a whole, to flourish; rather, it creates stress and apprehension.

There are some basic things you can try: ●● Empower your employees, which will lead to better engagement and a healthier workplace. ●● Conduct staff meetings that are not agenda-based but open forums for discussion. ●● Let employees make more decisions from the heart, not from the stated policy.

And especially during the holiday season, do not forget those less fortunate or in need and be mindful that employees have things going on in their personal lives. As administrators, we must avoid making the workplace even more challenging by micromanaging. Our lives are not shaped by power and prestige, but rather love, generosity, and kindness. Your management style can be a reflection of that.

JASON M. JONES is director, parking & mass transit services, at the University of Albany.

LIGHT BULBS AND LIGHT BULBS

By Isaiah Mouw, CAPP

This year, I worked to make our house a smart home. Our Roomba vacuums our floors. Our Nest controls the temperature. Our speakers and TV are powered by Google Cast. Our light bulbs were swapped out to smart Philips Hue bulbs. Wemo turns lamps on and off and Tile finds our wallets and keys when they go missing. All of this is controlled by our Google Home device.

I remember showing this off to my older brother, Jeremy, and the exchange went something like this: Isaiah: Hey Google, turn off the lights.

Google: I’m sorry. I don’t understand.

Jeremy chuckles to himself.

Isaiah: Hey Google, turn off the lights.

Google: I’m sorry. I can’t reach your lights right now.

Jeremy: I have an idea.

Jeremy then used the old-fashioned light switch to turn the lights off, much to everyone’s amusement and laughter, including my own.

That’s when a light bulb, pun intended, went off in my brain. Our smart lighting system does more than turn off or on based on a voice command and save our house energy and money. But my brother had a great point. How many times in the parking industry have we created, developed, adopted, purchased, or implemented smart solutions that may actually end up needing more time than doing things manually?

Technology isn’t always the answer and sometimes advancements don’t do much advancing. I read several articles recently about how autonomous vehicles may initially make traffic and congestion worse, not better. The key is ensuring you always do your due diligence before adopting certain technologies, and not being afraid to pivot if a certain technology isn’t working out. Parking has changed rapidly this decade and even significantly in 2018 alone. Most of this has been for the better. But remember that sometimes manually flipping a switch may be the most efficient method out there.

ISAIAH MOUW, CAPP, is vice president, municipal solutions with Citizens Lanier Holdings.

46 THE PARKING PROFESSIONAL | JANUARY 2019 | PARKING-MOBILITY.ORG

DISNEY, NORDSTROM, AND PARKING

By David M. Feehan

I was delighted to read the interview with Lee Cockerell in the November issue of The Parking Professional. I’ve always pointed to Disney as the gold standard when it comes to customer service. And I think every parking manager should take to heart the principles of customer service Cockerell articulates.

But way back in 1989, when I assumed the presidency of Downtown Kalamazoo Incorporated, and found that my organization would soon be operating the municipal parking system under contract, we had a different model in mind.

At the first meeting of our newly formed parking task force, I stood before a flip chart and asked task force members to consider this question: “How would our parking system feel if it were run by Nordstrom?” Everyone in the room knew Nordstrom was the epitome of retail customer service. Its efforts to please customers were legendary, so we began brainstorming all the changes we could make to alter the very negative perception downtown visitors had of visiting or shopping downtown.

Many of the changes we adopted have become industry standard–battery jumps, flat tire and lockout assistance, employee training–but we took matters several steps beyond these practices. For example, when there was a festival in the city park, we issued no parking citations within a six-block radius of the park. We did not want visitors to leave town with a negative impression. We empowered enforcement staff to void tickets if a motorist was returning to his car with a handful of quarters. We put our staff in bright green blazers instead of police-type uniforms. All staff carried fanny packs with maps, event schedules, and other downtown information. We trained every staff person to be an ambassador for downtown.

The results were, to put it mildly, surprising. Within a couple of years, customer complaints dropped by nearly 80 percent. Parking complaints to the mayor’s office were near zero. While ticket writing dropped by two-thirds, overall revenues increased by 50 percent, as customers filled up our spruced-up parking garages. Employees took pride in the fact that we won a couple of national awards.

So ask yourself this question: Is our parking system enforcement-oriented, revenueoriented, or customer-oriented? You may find that the latter option is the one that really pays off.

DAVID M. FEEHAN is president of Civitas Consulting, LLC.

Ready for more? Read IPMI’s blog every business day in your daily Forum digest email (10 a.m. Eastern) or at parking-mobility.org/blog.

Have something to say? Send post submissions to editor Kim Fernandez at fernandez@parking-mobility.org.

THE PARKING PROFESSIONAL | JANUARY 2019 | PARKING-MOBILITY.ORG 47

STATE AND REGIONAL SPOTLIGHT | TEXAS PARKING & TRANSPORTATION ASSOCIATION

A Year of Sharing in Texas

By Mary B. Mabry, CAPP

T

HE TEXAS PARKING & TRANSPORTATION ASSOCIATION (TPTA) works hard to educate members and their customers about the importance and effect of parking and transportation in general and promote industry best practices. In 2016 TPTA developed the following key priorities, which we have met and continue to build upon: ■■ Expand membership in the next two years.

■■ Enhance the Annual Conference. Review the pricing struc-

ture, expand conference offerings, and create a marketing strategy to target all parking and transportation professionals in Texas and surrounding states.

■■ Enhance outreach and communications. Connect members and vendors, establish member volunteer committees, launch an annual formal engagement survey, and formalize membership communications vehicles.

■■ Enhance the roundtable program. Institute social/networking events in conjunction with the roundtables, identify topics that appeal to different facets of parking and transportation, and create a volunteer committee.

2018 Conference and Tradeshow

The TPTA 2018 Conference and Tradeshow was held in downtown Houston at the Marriott Marquis. This year was different as we were visiting a city that was devastated by Hurricane Harvey, and attendees were enouraged to bring non-perishable food items for a unique charity opportunity. We then set up a mini-golf building and putting event challenge. Once the event ended, all items were then donated to hard-hit Houston food charities.

Networking and educational sessions were amazing as we had a huge selection of presentations covering topics for developing highly functioning teams, flexible and adaptive parking design, parking metrics, and sustainable parking strategies, just to name a few. TPTA thanks all our presenters, sponsors, and vendors for their generosity and support of our association and conferences. Our 308 attendees, 40 sponsors, and 52 vendors were not only gracious but encouraging through their loyalty to TPTA. We thank them all for their support of the 2018 Conference and Tradeshow.

48 THE PARKING PROFESSIONAL | JANUARY 2019 | PARKING-MOBILITY.ORG

TPTA BOARD OF DIRECTORS PRESIDENT Peter Lange Texas A&M University VICE PRESIDENT Maria Irshad, CAPP, MPA ParkHouston, City of Houston TREASURER Jacob Gonzalez WGI SECRETARY Mary B. Mabry, CAPP Cardinal Tracking, Inc IMMEDIATE PAST PRESIDENT Dean Ahmad DFW International Airport

Nicole Chinea, CAPP WGI Dennis Delaney, CAPP University of Texas at Austin Peter Elliott City of Fort Worth Parking Services Division Michelle Morris Toledo Ticket Company Paul Stresow City of El Paso Jane Wilcox SP+

Distinguished Service Award

Diane Confer University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center

Employee of the Year Lisa Alaniz ParkHouston

Parking Structure-New

West Campus Student Garage UT Arlington Parking & Transportation

Restoration Project

Williams Tower Parking Structure Walker Consultants

Parking Program

Improved Enforcement and Compliance Functions Using LPR UT Arlington Parking and Transportation

Parking Equipment and Technology

2019 Conference and Tradeshow:

Downtown Houston at the Marquis Marriott, April 22–25, 2019.

More events will be planned throughout the year so be sure to check texasparking.com or email TPTA@texasparking.org.

Going Gateless Sam Houston State University

MARY B. MABRY, CAPP, is product manager/

project manager, parking solutions, with Cardinal Tracking, Inc. She can be reached at mmabry@ cardinaltracking.com.

THE PARKING PROFESSIONAL | JANUARY 2019 | PARKING-MOBILITY.ORG 49

Around the Industry Nedap Launches NB-IoT Parking Sensor NEDAP, A SPECIALIST IN PARKING detection technology,

launched the narrowband internet of things (NB-IoT) version of its SENSIT smart parking sensor. SENSIT is the ­sensor-based vehicle detection system that enables motorists to quickly find available parking spaces. With the introduction of the new sensor, Nedap empowers Smart Cities and other urban areas to collect real-time parking data using their NBIoT network. During the Smart City Expo in Barcelona, Spain, Nov. 13–15, 2018, Nedap demonstrated its new smart parking sensor to the market.

NB-IoT technology connects devices to the internet using the 5G network provided by telecom providers. This innovative technology will have a great impact on people’s daily lives, as it is expected to connect over 25 billion devices ranging from street lights to parking sensors.

With almost 15 years of experience in smart parking projects all over the world, Nedap has obtained a lot of knowledge by applying its proprietary SENSIT network. SENSIT consists of on-street sensors that detect in real-time if a single parking bay is occupied and how long it has been occupied. With the

addition of NB-IoT, this leading smart parking platform now empowers Smart Cities and other urban areas to collect real-time parking data using a NB-IoT network.

Nedap is convinced that NB-IoT technology offers many opportunities for smart parking in every urban area. The NB-IoT technology is interesting for cities that aim to use a big amount of sensors that need to communicate over this network. It is cost effective, uses low power, and offers a good performance. Typical applications include on-street parking guidance and efficient enforcement of designated spaces, such as disabled and e-charging zones.

After a year of combined development and proof of concepts with the two leading telecom providers, T-Systems and Vodafone, Nedap is ready for the next step in smart parking.

In cooperation with telecom providers and Nedap’s existing worldwide partner network, the NB-IoT SENSIT sensor is introduced to the market. The new sensors are applied in projects in Germany, the Netherlands, and Italy and will be applied in Czech Republic, Poland, and Croatia soon. Next year, the NBIoT SENSIT sensors are expected to be available worldwide.

BuildMark Chooses Park Assist’s M4 Smart-Sensor Parking Guidance System for the New Coloradan PARK ASSIST HAS BEEN AWARDED THE parking guidance system (PGS) contract for the Coloradan, a new condominium development located in Denver, Colo.

The LEED Gold certified building will offer a rooftop pool, community garden, curated art collection, and retail space.

Because the Coloradan is a mixed-use property in which parkers will be residents, visitors, and shoppers, Buildmark selected Park Assist to introduce technology that will help shoppers and visitors effortlessly find parking, while also preserving the privacy and exclusivity of resident parking.

Shoppers and visitors will be seamlessly guided to available spaces and will be able to

quickly find their car with Park Assist’s Find Your Car™ feature. The Coloradan will offer

an app so that shoppers and visitors can find their vehicle’s exact location by typing in their license plate number.

The Coloradan’s PGS technology also includes Park Assist’s Park Alerts™ soft-

50 THE PARKING PROFESSIONAL | JANUARY 2019 | PARKING-MOBILITY.ORG

ware feature that allows management to effectively monitor space utilization and enforce parking policies to ensure that resident parking remains exclusive to owners. Park Alerts™ will send notifications of any policy violations by offering time-based or license plate-based alerts.

“We are thrilled to work for Buildmark in helping to deliver an elevated parking experience for all of the Coloradan’s key constituencies,” says Vince Balsamo, Park Assist’s general manager of North America.

The project began in early October 2018 and went live in December 2018, right in line with the building’s official completion.

PayByPhone Names Roamy Valera, CAPP, CEO, US And Canada PAYBYPHONE, THE GLOBAL MOBILE parking payments company, announced that Roamy Valera, CAPP, has been named CEO, U.S. and Canada. An internationally respected parking industry leader, Valera is the current chair of the International Parking and Mobility Institute’s (IPMI) Board of Directors. PayByPhone is one of the fastest-growing mobile payment companies in the world, and its industry-leading smart device app is used by more than 17 million people across the globe.

“We are very excited to announce that Roamy Valera has joined PayByPhone as CEO, U.S. and Canada,” says Andreas Gruber, president and Global CEO of PayByPhone. “Roamy is universally respected throughout the parking industry, and he will be a tremendous leader as we expand our reach across North America.”

In his new position, Valera will oversee the day-to-day operations of PayByPhone in the U.S. and Canada and lead the development and execution of the company’s growth strategy throughout North America. He will also work closely with PayByPhone’s global executive team to develop and implement corporate strategy.

“This is an exciting time in the parking and mobility space, and PayByPhone is poised to do great things,” says Valera.

“We are on the cusp of an exciting mobile future of connected

vehicles and smart cities, and I’m thrilled to have an opportunity to help PayByPhone lead the way.

“The future belongs to companies like PayByPhone who understand MaaS—mobility as a service,” Valera says. “The key to success is reducing friction and removing the pain associated with parking and mobility. If we focus on the needs of people, rather than cars, our opportunities for growth and innovation will be limitless.”

Valera has nearly 30 years of parking industry experience.

He began his career as an enforcement officer for the Miami, Fla., Parking Authority, and he has worked for many public and private parking organizations. He attributes his success in the industry to having the opportunity to progress up the ranks, from an entry-level professional to a corporate and parking industry leader. He joins PayByPhone from NewTown Advisors, an acclaimed parking and mobility consulting firm where he served as CEO. “PayByPhone was the first mobile payment company in the U.S. parking market, and we’ve always been the pioneers when it comes to providing the easiest and most convenient payment experience,” Gruber says. “Roamy Valera’s appointment is the first of many exciting announcements we have planned for the coming months.”

Proper Announces Annual Thanksgiving Good Carma Initiative PROPARK AMERICA ANNOUNCED that the company launched its annual Good Carma Thanksgiving food drive at locations across the United States.

“We’re always very humbled to be able to contribute to our host communities in meaningful and positive ways,” explained Joe Coppola, Propark’s managing partner. “Our Good Carma initiative is something that is important to us as a company because it allows us to provide support to people who are less fortunate than ourselves.”

During the month of November, leading up to Thanksgiving, Propark conducted food drives from coast to coast, benefitting worthwhile charitable organizations, including City Harvest, the Food

Bank of Lower Fairfield County, San Francisco-Marin Food Bank, Los Angeles Regional Food Bank, and Houston Food Bank.

“We really believe that parking facilities are a natural donation point because people don’t have to go out of their way to make a non-perishable food donation,” Coppola says. “Our goal is to make it super easy and convenient for our guests to join us in fighting hunger. We appreciate any and all donations as we look to spread Good Carma to as many people as we can this Thanksgiving.”

Donation bins were located at various parking facilities across the country for at least two weeks, beginning on Nov. 1, 2018.

THE PARKING PROFESSIONAL | JANUARY 2019 | PARKING-MOBILITY.ORG 51

Around the Industry

continued

Gatwick Airport Signs Up ParkCloud to Capture Larger Slice of Parking Market MANCHESTER-BASED ONLINE PARKING RESERVATION company ParkCloud has entered into a collaboration with the U.K.’s second largest airport, London Gatwick (LGW).

With this significant addition to its U.K. airport portfolio, ParkCloud is pleased to announce that passengers flying from Gatwick’s North and South terminals will now be able to reserve their parking through its extensive online network across a number of the airport’s parking products.

The car parks available to ParkCloud’s 3.3 million users include Premium Parking North, Long Stay North, Valet Parking North, Short Stay North, Summer Special North, Long Stay South, Short Stay South, and Valet Parking South.

Additionally, customers will be able to bolster their travel experience by pre-booking security FastTrack and lounge passes for No1 Lounges, to complement their parking reservation.

London Gatwick passengers flying from the South Terminal with British Airways, Wizz Air, or Vueling will also be able to reserve parking via ParkCloud’s airline partnerships, allowing fluidity for the customer at every point of the booking journey.

Denzil Dolan, senior product manager (commercial car parks and ancillaries) at Gatwick Airport, says, “As passenger

numbers continue to rise, it is more pertinent than ever that we consolidate our efforts and extend our parking network for our growing customer base.

“As an established market leader in its field, we’re confident the collaboration with ParkCloud will yield positive results for both companies and, of course, our shared customers.”

The initial collaboration between Gatwick and ParkCloud— which is based on Oxford Street—dates back to summer 2017, when an agreement to facilitate sales of parking in and around Gatwick Airport through easyJet’s white label was established.

Stainless Steel Bollards Provide Attractive Housings for ANPR and Traffic Signals

SSDP-ANPR

PEOPLE AND VEHICLE access control specialist Nortech is now offering elegant stainless steel bollards to house the Nedap ANPR cameras.

The SSP-­ANPR and ­SSDP-ANPR stainless steel posts by Nortech are each ­designed to house either a Nedap ANPR Access or a Nedap SSP-ANPR

ANPR Access-HD camera in an attractive roadside post/bollard. The SSDP-ANPR is a dual-height post that includes integral traffic signals.

The ANPR camera is mounted at the ideal height (585mm to lens) for reading standard number plates. It is contained within the body of the post with no restriction to either the lens or IR lighting. Once fitted, the rear of the camera can be accessed via a service panel. It incorporates a 300mm base plate with slotted holes that allow easy adjustment during installation.

52 THE PARKING PROFESSIONAL | JANUARY 2019 | PARKING-MOBILITY.ORG

The traffic signal mounted at the top of the SSDP-ANPR may be controlled directly from the access controller or barrier logic using individual 24V control signals for each of the red and green LED clusters.

Nortech has supplied products and solutions to the security industry for over 25 years as an independent British company. The company uses extensive experience and expertise to create new security products to fit its clients’ needs and designs everything with the customer in mind.

The City of Pasadena Partners with Inugo to Transform Its Downtown Parking INUGO ANNOUNCED THAT the city of Pasadena has chosen Inugo as its partner of choice and will be installing the Inugo solution into three of its downtown garages.

“We are delighted to be working with the city of Pasadena to transform the way visitors park” says Sam Barclay, CEO of Inugo. “Inugo will allow drivers to find parking easily, park ticketlessly, and charge them automatically when they leave.

Parking is simple with Inugo.”

Inugo delivers frictionless parking technology in a simpleto-use cloud-based platform. Inugo can open any gate using the Inugo App and Inugo Intelligent Gate Controller using Bluetooth™ wireless technology.

With a single view across multiple facilities, Inugo has been designed to reduce administrative time, operational costs, and revenue leakage for the parking provider and a stress free parking experience for the parker.

Inugo technology can help cities implement Smart Cities Share Parking programs, where commercial or residential parking can be opened up to public use when not in use. These programs can deliver increases in parking capacity without building new parking facilities.

“Inugo is a perfect solution for us, giving us the ability to offer a self service option and improved customer experience” says Jon Hamblen, parking manager for the city of Pasadena.

“It offers us a smart way of providing access and it leverages technology in a way that our equipment was not able to previously. We are very happy with the installation.”

SWARCO Traffic Improving School Safety for Cornwall Council AN INNOVATIVE VEHICLE-ACTIVATED SIGN (VAS) system from SWARCO Traffic Ltd that is remotely monitored and controlled is helping increase the safety of schoolchildren and reduce maintenance costs for Cornwall Council in the U.K. SWARCO has installed 16 of its signs at three school sites across the county— six VAS at both St. Stephens Primary School in Launceston and Grampound Primary School, along with four signs at Bodmin College—to advise drivers of the advisory 20 mph speed limit during school times.

SWARCO’s innovative remote monitoring system is an easy-to-use webbased software that allows the council to set timetables, on/off times, and temporary speed limits on school roads. Any faults that should occur, such as communications, power or LED failures, can be issued and viewed with the touch of a

button, ensuring that the safety-­critical signs remain in optimum condition while reducing manual maintenance and engineering costs.

Mike Green, ITC operations officer at Cornwall Council, says that SWARCO’s reliability and experience makes the company a valuable partner. “We have used SWARCO technology on a number of installations across the county. Their products are both reliable and high quality. Similarly, their after-care and customer service is of a very high standard; they are always quick to provide us with support should we require it.

“The new signs have allowed us to monitor and manage the performance of the school signs, as well as improving safety on the roads close to the schools by displaying the advisory speed limit for passing vehicles. We can also now receive notifications via the remote monitoring system so that we are immediately

aware of any issues and can deal with these efficiently.”

The work was completed in partnership with SSE Enterprise Contracting, responsible for the installation and maintenance of street lighting, traffic signals, and illuminated street signs for Cornwall Council. The three parties enjoy a well-established and long-term working relationship.

THE PARKING PROFESSIONAL | JANUARY 2019 | PARKING-MOBILITY.ORG 53

Around the Industry

continued

New DESIGNA Technology Makes UK Debut at Shopping Center PAY-ON-FOOT PARKING SYSTEMS manufacturer DESIGNA has worked with the White Rose shopping center in Rhyl, North Wales, to update its car parking system to the company’s advanced ABACUS software and equipment.

After many successful installations abroad, the shopping center is the first DESIGNA site in the U.K. to have installed its new tap-in/tap-out contactless credit card technology.

The installation included new stateof-the-art entrance and exit terminals accepting tap-in/tap-out contactless card payment technology. There are also three full pay stations, a DBS server, manual pay station, and intercom. All of this helps to improve the efficiency and security of the car park, which is popular with shoppers due to its seafront location.

As the first part of the shopping experience, the convenience and availability of a car park is crucial to the overall

service and satisfaction of a customer.

DESIGNA recognized this and developed ABACUS, an advanced car park access system that intelligently integrates various elements to create the ultimate system that is highly reliable and low maintenance. It is also able to cope with large volumes of traffic while providing the highest level of monitoring to ensure a secure parking environment.

The parking system is barrier controlled and makes use of DESIGNA barcode ticket technology. In addition to using the standard ticket technology, the car park offers the facility tap-in/ tap-out technology using a contactless credit card. This operates with a unique identifier from the credit/debit card as a substitute for a ticket for the duration of the stay at the car park. When the customer presents a contactless card on entry, the system recognizes it, and by tapping again at exit it automatically calculates the tariff and allows payment

54 THE PARKING PROFESSIONAL | JANUARY 2019 | PARKING-MOBILITY.ORG

to take place at the exit. The system has three pay-on-foot machines that accept coins, notes, and credit cards.

With more than 30 stores, White Rose shopping center, Rhyl’s No. 1 shopping destination, has a wide range of quality stores. Located in the center of the town, White Rose is a short walk from Rhyl’s seafront, railway station, and sea aquarium and has direct access car parking for 300 vehicles. The center previously had a chip-coin solution installed onsite.

Sue Nash, center manager at the White Rose, commented, “The biggest advantage of having the DESIGNA system in place is the easy payment method. The advanced ticket machines make it possible to pay using several means, therefore reducing the problem of queuing at the pay machines and having to pay with change. Another payment option we now have is the facility to pay through mobile devices and via contactless cards.

“The majority of people move around with credit cards rather than cash, and having a versatile payment option in the car park makes for a painless process. The maintenance of the system at our local level was extremely important to avoid costly and timely engineer callouts. Simple things like ticket and coin jams, system resets are now extremely easy to resolve as is the exchange of entry tickets when required. I would certainly recommend the DESIGNA system to others, and we are extremely pleased with the results.”

Specifier Andrew Bailey of Parking Ideas says, “Parking Ideas is a com-

plete car parking and transportation consultancy that helps institutions, property owners, landlords, and managing agents develop and optimize their assets. I have worked with the White Rose shopping center for a number of years, and following a competitive tender found that DESIGNA’s systems best-suited the client’s requirements.

“The ABACUS system is good value, commercially viable, and ticked all the right boxes for the White Rose. It is very important to have the facility to pay by card, so the payment terminals having this feature are vital to the center and have made all the difference to the running of the car park. Parking Ideas has been in the parking industry for more than 15 years so we have worked with DESIGNA before and are very happy with the end result.”

The car park’s entrance and exit are installed with DESIGNA In+ and Out+ ticket terminals so that using the site is fast and easy. The advanced terminals operate on the lowest energy consumption of their class with the ability to hold more tickets than before, with the bin adapting itself to the fill quantity.

Customers are greeted with excellent user-friendliness due to the simplicity of the equipment and illuminated display with clear instructions.

The four-way barcode readers also ensure visitors

can insert their ticket any way round into any of the pay stations at the site.

For payment, three of DESIGNA’s new pay-on-foot machines are in place in the car park. This allows customers to pay for their visit before returning to their car and exit the car park more quickly. The pay station is deliberately designed to allow customers with disabilities to pay freely without assistance.

Each of the pay stations is installed with an interactive monitor that makes it easy to pay and offers several different languages.

Shopping center management has full control of the ABACUS system through the DBS server, with a manual pay station to allow employees to create or override payments. The control room also links with the ticket and payment terminals via a DESIGNA VoIP intercom to assist customers if required.

DESIGNA’s parking systems are used in a number of shopping centers around the world. These include the Dundrum shopping center in Dublin, Ireland; the Mid Valley Megamall in Malaysia; and the Mall of Emirates in Dubai. In the U.K., the Belfry shopping center in Redhill, the Woolshops shopping center in Halifax, and the Wellgate center in Dundee have also benefited from the ABACUS system.

THE PARKING PROFESSIONAL | JANUARY 2019 | PARKING-MOBILITY.ORG 55

Parking Consultants

Strategic Planning and Management Maintenance and Restoration Design and Construction Technologies www.kimley-horn.com/parking

Architecture | Engineering | Consulting The leading expert in developing structured parking solutions. www.ipd-global.com | 877 IPD PARK

DESMAN

Design Management National Parking Specialists Architects Structural Engineers Parking Consultants Planners Transportation Restoration Engineers

Boston Chicago Cleveland Denver Ft Lauderdale Hartford New York Pittsburgh Washington, D.C.

Green Parking Consulting

Providing Parking Solutions for Over 40 Years

w w w. D ES M A N . co m

56  THE PARKING PROFESSIONAL | JANUARY 2019 | PARKING-MOBILITY.ORG

WALKERCONSULTANTS.COM

Creating Parking for People and Places

Brian Lozano, PMP 800.364.7300 / WALTERPMOORE.COM Parking and Transportation Planning Parking Design and Consulting Structural Engineering Structural Diagnostics Traffic Engineering Civil Engineering Intelligent Transportation Systems Systems Integration

THE PARKING PROFESSIONAL | JANUARY 2019 | PARKING-MOBILITY.ORG 57

Advertisers Index CHANCE Management Advisors, Inc. .. . . . .57 chancemanagement.com 215.564.6464

Kimley-Horn and Associates, Inc. . . . . . . . 5, 56 kimley-horn.com/parking 919.653.6646

Walker Consultants. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .57 walkerconsultants.com 800.860.1579

DESMAN. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .56 desman.com 877.337.6260

PayByPhone Technologies, Inc. . . . . . . . . . . . .C2 paybyphone.com 877.610.2054

Walter P Moore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .57 walterpmoore.com 800.364.7300

Aims Parking. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1 aimsparking.com 800.886.6316

Rich & Associates, Inc.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 richassoc.com 248.353.5080

WGI. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11 WGInc.com 866.909.2220

International Parking Design, Inc.. . . . . . . . . .56 ipd-global.com 818.986.1494

Southland Printing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 southlandprinting.com 800.241.8662

Women In Parking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 womeninparking.com 800.397.5130

IPS Group Inc.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .C3 ipsgroupinc.com 858.404.0607

Toledo Ticket. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . C4 toledoticket.com 800.533.6620

GET MORE FROM YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA HABIT.

Industry updates, news and quick informational bites, job postings, and a lot of fun.

58 THE PARKING PROFESSIONAL | JANUARY 2019 | PARKING-MOBILITY.ORG

Follow IPMI on Facebook and Twitter at @IPMInow.

Get social with us!

CALENDAR

2019 IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII JANUARY 16

IPMI Webinar: Municipal Procurement: Repeating Mistakes on Purpose parking-mobility.org/webinars

JANUARY 29

Parksmart Advisor Online, Instructor-led Training begins parking-mobility.org/parksmart

IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII MARCH 4

Mid South Transportation & Parking Association Spring Conference & Tradeshow Lexington, Ky. mstpa.org

MARCH 21

New York State Parking Association Lunch & Learn nyspa.net

MARCH 28

Southwest Parking & Transportation Association Mid-year Training & Conference Tucson, Ariz. southwestparking.org

IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII APRIL 3

APRIL 22

Texas Parking & Transportation Association Conference & Tradeshow Houston, Texas texasparking.org

APRIL 24

Parking Association of Georgia Conference Stone Mountain, Ga. parkingassociationofgeorgia.com

IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII MAY 10

Pennsylvania Parking Association Spring Conference & Tradeshow Philadelphia, Pa. paparking.org

IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII JUNE 9–12

2019 IPMI Conference & Expo Anaheim, Calif. ipiconference.parking.org

IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII JULY 9

Parksmart Advisor Online, Instructor-Led Training begins parking-mobility.org/parksmart

New England Parking Council Annual Conference Hartford, Conn. newenglandparkingcouncil.org

THE PARKING PROFESSIONAL | JANUARY 2019 | PARKING-MOBILITY.ORG 59

WWW

. PARKING -MOBILITY. ORG

In Case You Missed It… ON THE BLOG ➚ CAPP Compadres, by Casey Jones, CAPP ➚ Adaptive Reuse: A Case Study ➚ The Unseen ROI of Leadership Skills, by Rita Pagan ➚ A New Curb Management Assessment, by L. Dennis Burns, CAPP ➚ Thirty-two Hours in the World’s Self-driving Car Capital ead these and more (and submit your own posts) at parking-mobility.org/blog ➚ Rand in your daily Forum email.

AT THE FORUM ➚ What are your procedures for chalking tires? ➚ Does anyone have a sample parking lot inspection sheet? ➚ What might happen to ticket volume after implementing LPR? ➚ Does anyone have a shared parking program they wish to share? ➚ How do you categorize bikes, scooters, e-scooters, etc? sk your own questions, offer your expertise, and network with colleagues from ➚ Aaround the world at forum.parking-mobility.org.

ON THE WEBSITE rchived articles, blog posts, and other references in the Resource Center— ➚ Acompletely searchable by keyword. nformation about the Alliance for Parking Data Standards, including what it ➚ Imeans for organizations and how you can get involved.

➚ Everything you’ll want to know about IPMI’s name change and plans for the future. ➚ And more!

All from your desk, on your time, at parking-mobility.org.

60 THE PARKING PROFESSIONAL | JANUARY 2019 | PARKING-MOBILITY.ORG

Ed Wojtysiak | Enforcement Ambassador University of Minnesota Duluth

IPS ENFORCEMENT. SMILES INCLUDED. Better user interface. Faster information. Smarter reports.

Designed for you.

Enforcement | Permitting | Smart Meters | Sensors Request a demo at ipsgroupinc.com/demo © IPS GROUP, INC.

Gumby and Gumby characters are trademarks of Prema Toy Company, Inc. All rights reserved. Š2018 Prema Toy Company, Inc.

JANUARY 2019 The Parking Professional ● AN INTERVIEW WITH LAWRENCE BURNS ● MARKETING TRENDS FOR 2019 ● LEADERSHIP APPRENTICESHIP ● IPMI’S YEAR IN REVIEW ● OPENING UP TECHNOLOGY