How to avoid being shocked with traffic congestion at Christmas
In an ideal world, parking managers would be able to run their departments in a way that enables their customers to view them as a helpful resource. Most responsible motorists want to find parking, save time and money and leave the area as soon as they can. The rush for Christmas shopping used to start in early December. Then shoppers responded to the increasing congestion in our towns and cities and noting the declining availability of parking, people decided to start their shopping earlier and one started to see congestion in mid-November. This year, some shopping areas have seen parking queues in October. Shoppers see parking services providers as a invisible service. They are nowhere to be seen.
This leads one to a second point. Shoppers see their councils in terms of their willingness to be active service providers. They want to see their council wanting to listen to them. They want to see their parking managers considering the shoppers’ best interest at this busy time of the year. However, preparation for this year’s Christmas shopping congestion should have started three Christmases ago.
Most Parking ‘Service Plans’ are not only linear, they are written by engineers for implementation by engineers. Most service plans provide technical solutions whilst maintaining as much of the ‘status quo’ as possible. The real blockages are not engineers though. It’s the policy makers.
Parking services need strategic business modelling that allow them to distinguish between expansion and growth. Short-run incrementals for expansion can be funded from current resources and from improvements in productivity or cashflow. Growth can only come with strategic investment. The business model selects 4-6 variables and allows policy makers to see the impact of this type of challenge.
There is one problem, though. Policy makers are normally politicians. The business model invariably throws up a few harsh realities. A parking manager should be able to say, “ This problem can be solved with an investment of say, £1 million. However, for services to improve, policy makers need to find £20 million over five years”. Managers generally prefer not to provide accurate modelling forecasts to policy makers, who in turn would not want to concede that for a London borough’s traffic congestion to ease, for example, it is going to cost them £20 million. Apart from the old ‘hostage to fortune’ explanation, managers like to be safe in their jobs. Policy makers also want to remain in their roles as long as possible.
However, in the course of inspection work for the Audit Commission, I have had the privilege of meeting at least one executive director of a major local authority, who said, “ Yes, I do have a business model, but it is secret”. Only he knew the real scale of investment required to solve his council’s parking problem.
Traffic engineers have known for years that traffic behaves much like a moving fluid, transmitting shock waves of congestion far upstream - and sometimes downstream - from bottlenecks. Now they are beginning to understand better how these these shock waves can result from the most trifling causes, and how driving habits can contribute to the disruption. Other kinds of mathematical analysis tell engineers how to time city traffic lights to minimise delays to traffic.
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james wilkins
www.drivenwide.com
Posted by: james wilkins | October 11, 2008 at 08:19 PM