27 July 2013

Andrew Barr wants your thoughts on modernising pay parking

| johnboy
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Andrew Barr has noted the plight of the little people and wants some ideas of how to free you from the bags of change needed to park around Canberra:

Businesses are invited to put forward ideas for the procurement of pay parking machines for the Territory including innovative ideas for paying by smartphone or MyWay cards.

The ACT Government is today releasing its draft specifications for the procurement of 300 offUstreet pay parking machines, prior to the official tender process.

Prior to the official tender process the Government is keen to work with industry and hear their views on the draft specifications.

By releasing the draft specifications to industry we are keen to benefit from their knowledge and skills. The Government wants to examine innovative ideas and see what solutions are possible before formally starting the tender process. .

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kea said :

Ryoma said :

It’s not exactly what Mr. Barr is looking for, but I wish that the ACT Government would have a good look at the type of vertical car parking solutions that exist in Japan (and presumably elsewhere).

They are not necessarily the huge monsters that exist next to/on top of shopping centres, but rather often just three or so car spaces wide, and up to 10 stories tall. The beauty of them is that they use the space efficiently, allowing land to be freed up for other uses.

You simply drive your car in, put coins (or credit card) in to pay for an amount of time, and then when you come back,you type in a pin number, and drive your car away.

It looks like this:
http://www.japanretailnews.com/2/post/2008/03/parking-systems-in-japan.html

We had this system in an apartment complex in Newtown, Sydney. Worked fine if you commute, and don’t need to take your car out every day, but if you did drive to work, it would take around 4-7 minutes for each car to return to ground level. There would be queues every morning. Except on the mornings when the system was broken and you couldn’t get your car out at all. Approximately 3 or 4 times a month. And usually around the time of new tenants moving in8, pushing wrong buttons and breaking the whole thing.
*I may or may not have once been responsible for such actions

Kea, it’s interesting to hear that such systems do in fact exist in Australia….and sad to hear what your experience of them was. I agree with you that 4-7 minutes does indeed suck, and getting the car stuck altogether 3-4 times a month would be just horrible.

My experience was that it would take about 2 minutes for a car to arrive, and in Japan, the machines always worked well. Maybe another large part of it had to do with many Japanese people being patient enough to wait for their car to arrive, instead of pushing all the buttons while swearing loudly? 😀
I am, of course, sure that you never did such things, as you have said so 😛

But actually, I wonder if it’s both this, and a maintenance issue; i.e developer puts this thing, but there is no after-sales service. Landlord doesn’t care, after all, they’re getting rent, and nobody knows who to call to fix the thing. The 8th wonder of the world, Australian customer service,strikes again….sigh…

just make everybody ride a bicycle…

How about they stop dicking around the issue and do something. Instead of this long winded useless ‘consultation’ where they never implement anything we want/need anyway.
Put in a system that has the ability to take eftpos, myway, NFC/mobile payments and the ability for software updates in the future.
Let’s face it, if we get them to think long term in the upgrade ability of the machines they will sit on their hands trying to workout what they want and we’ll fall even further behind.
Just put something in that’s remotely modern and move on to the bigger issues at hand.

How about “pay on exit” so we don’t have to try and guess how long the meeting will go, and then worry all through second-half of the meeting that it’s dragging on longer than you thought…. it’s like trying to guess how much electricity you’ll use in the quarter, and getting fined if you guess it wrong!

I think we should all get Barr codes on our wrists. Whenever we go anywhere we can just swipe our wrist and hey presto. Parking, banking, food, beer, taxes. It could all be covered by the Barr code. Better still we could all get microchipped. This would have the added advantage of being able to track down people that call in sick or stay too long at the Kingo. It would make life a lot easier till we find out how to get out of this matrix.

p1 said :

How about a RAPID type camera at the entrance/exit of a car park. When you enter and leave at captures your rego plate and bills you for the time?

That’s actually a really good idea, and numberplate recognition cameras cost only a fraction of what pay machines cost (not to mention may be less prone to vandalism or car skimming scams).

steveu said :

IMHO they are pretty quick to just do things without consultation, why all of a sudden they have developed a sense of integrity and transparency in govt? I am glad they are trying to be open, but as other posters have suggested, should have happened years ago.

Call in powers are only to be used when they benefit developers.

How about a RAPID type camera at the entrance/exit of a car park. When you enter and leave at captures your rego plate and bills you for the time?

But it has taken them a long time to get around to consulting about new machines, I don’t want to suggest anything which will take even longer (to consider then reject).

Pretty much all new POS card reading systems can now read contactless type cards, so letting people pay by myway or mobile phone with near field technology should just be a matter of software, surely.

Ryoma said :

It’s not exactly what Mr. Barr is looking for, but I wish that the ACT Government would have a good look at the type of vertical car parking solutions that exist in Japan (and presumably elsewhere).

They are not necessarily the huge monsters that exist next to/on top of shopping centres, but rather often just three or so car spaces wide, and up to 10 stories tall. The beauty of them is that they use the space efficiently, allowing land to be freed up for other uses.

You simply drive your car in, put coins (or credit card) in to pay for an amount of time, and then when you come back,you type in a pin number, and drive your car away.

It looks like this:
http://www.japanretailnews.com/2/post/2008/03/parking-systems-in-japan.html

We had this system in an apartment complex in Newtown, Sydney. Worked fine if you commute, and don’t need to take your car out every day, but if you did drive to work, it would take around 4-7 minutes for each car to return to ground level. There would be queues every morning. Except on the mornings when the system was broken and you couldn’t get your car out at all. Approximately 3 or 4 times a month. And usually around the time of new tenants moving in8, pushing wrong buttons and breaking the whole thing.
*I may or may not have once been responsible for such actions

Just privatise the car parks. The free market will lower prices and improve service.

Yay.

banco said :

peitab said :

Madam Cholet said :

Just buy them and install them for goodness sake. Only about a decade behind every other city. And make sure that meters are also upgraded.

This.

Consultation complete.

+1 Barr is a useless clown. There are multiple private carparks in canberra that have pay parking machines that take credit card and that work just fine. Find out who makes the machines and put in an order.

+ 1

IMHO they are pretty quick to just do things without consultation, why all of a sudden they have developed a sense of integrity and transparency in govt? I am glad they are trying to be open, but as other posters have suggested, should have happened years ago.

They should have had this in place way before they started their genocide on cars.
And why the MyWay tender wasnt scoped to include pay parking payment systems (or have a scope extension on the tender) I do not know. Should have been rolled out at the same time.

I know its a little off track but while he is at it can he also consider the issue of child care, part-timers and parking. Some park n rides built in conjunction with childcare centres. Or perhaps parking that works for part-timer hours etc. Currently this city has a very high percentage of parents returning to work after having children. However that will change if it doesn’t provide the means for parents to get children to childcare and then get to work easily and safely.

thebrownstreak69 said :

banco said :

peitab said :

Madam Cholet said :

Just buy them and install them for goodness sake. Only about a decade behind every other city. And make sure that meters are also upgraded.

This.

Consultation complete.

+1 Barr is a useless clown. There are multiple private carparks in canberra that have pay parking machines that take credit card and that work just fine. Find out who makes the machines and put in an order.

Agreed. Just solve the f*ing problem using the obvious solution.

And then take a flogging from all & sundry for awarding such a high-profile technology infrastructure contract to the first vendor they talk to. Nup.

I agree that it’d be great to get these things in the ground and working asap, but the call for proposals is necessary so they can hear from industry regarding what current technology has to offer in terms of cash & cashless transactions.

There is no argument that the system will need to include cash & basic credit card, but it also needs to be capable of expanding to other payment methods as they become more commonplace eg. smartphone apps, sms texts, pre-paid credit such as MyWay or others. And there’s a whole host of both local and elsewhere suppliers, businesses and tech innovators full of brilliant, clever ideas on how to make this work and what the technology is capable of.

It’d be great to just buy the same ones as the company up the road, but the process requires them to ensure there is fair opportunity for potential tenderers to put forward proposals and formally present their case. Maybe they could have done this sooner, but they haven’t. Now this is the way it has to happen.

thebrownstreak693:21 pm 28 Jul 13

banco said :

peitab said :

Madam Cholet said :

Just buy them and install them for goodness sake. Only about a decade behind every other city. And make sure that meters are also upgraded.

This.

Consultation complete.

+1 Barr is a useless clown. There are multiple private carparks in canberra that have pay parking machines that take credit card and that work just fine. Find out who makes the machines and put in an order.

Agreed. Just solve the f*ing problem using the obvious solution.

Masquara said :

Why the f aren’t they installing parking machines that take credit cards, like every other municipality worth its salt? What’s this with Myway cards? What the f is Myway? Is that something to do with Action? Who the f has a smartphone card?

And what were all those overseas research trips for, if not to bring back knowledge of best f’ing practice?

Perhaps if you’d done less swearing and more readin’, you’d have noticed:

…at a minimum the new machines will accept payment by credit card.

banco said :

peitab said :

Madam Cholet said :

Just buy them and install them for goodness sake. Only about a decade behind every other city. And make sure that meters are also upgraded.

This.

Consultation complete.

+2

how hard can it be to install modern pay parking machines!!

bloody ACT Govt certainly knows how to complicate things.
+1 Barr is a useless clown. There are multiple private carparks in canberra that have pay parking machines that take credit card and that work just fine. Find out who makes the machines and put in an order.

Why the f aren’t they installing parking machines that take credit cards, like every other municipality worth its salt? What’s this with Myway cards? What the f is Myway? Is that something to do with Action? Who the f has a smartphone card?

And what were all those overseas research trips for, if not to bring back knowledge of best f’ing practice?

screaming banshee said :

For flaps sake ETOLL ON ENTRY AND EXIT!!!!

And force everyone to have a toll tag on their vehicle just to park?

I’ve already got one, and I still think that’s an awful idea!

peitab said :

Madam Cholet said :

Just buy them and install them for goodness sake. Only about a decade behind every other city. And make sure that meters are also upgraded.

This.

Consultation complete.

+1 Barr is a useless clown. There are multiple private carparks in canberra that have pay parking machines that take credit card and that work just fine. Find out who makes the machines and put in an order.

How about, stop allowing development on existing car parks. You would think this was obvious, but is seems not.

Madam Cholet said :

Just buy them and install them for goodness sake. Only about a decade behind every other city. And make sure that meters are also upgraded.

This.

Consultation complete.

screaming banshee2:50 pm 27 Jul 13

For flaps sake ETOLL ON ENTRY AND EXIT!!!!

It’s not exactly what Mr. Barr is looking for, but I wish that the ACT Government would have a good look at the type of vertical car parking solutions that exist in Japan (and presumably elsewhere).

They are not necessarily the huge monsters that exist next to/on top of shopping centres, but rather often just three or so car spaces wide, and up to 10 stories tall. The beauty of them is that they use the space efficiently, allowing land to be freed up for other uses.

You simply drive your car in, put coins (or credit card) in to pay for an amount of time, and then when you come back,you type in a pin number, and drive your car away.

It looks like this:
http://www.japanretailnews.com/2/post/2008/03/parking-systems-in-japan.html

Apart from the obvious swipe card facility (eg credit card and extension of the MyWay card) what about a requirement for the user to input their rego number when getting a voucher.

This would allow people who have to stay longer than intended to top up their parking to a daily capped rate rather than feed the meter at short term rates. For example, I can see this happening to tourists in the Triangle a lot.

Depending on your point of view, downsides include; it would stop people overstaying the maximum limit for their car space (at the moment, provided an inspector hasn’t been round, drivers can keep feeding the meter) and it would stop people passing their unexpired vouchers to others to use. Admittedly, I do both of these myself.

Madam Cholet11:40 am 27 Jul 13

Just buy them and install them for goodness sake. Only about a decade behind every other city. And make sure that meters are also upgraded.

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