Mobile Parking: Linda Lucks, Venice Neighborhood Council (interview)

The U.S. Parking Industry conservatively generates more than $25-30 billion in gross parking revenues. An overview of The International Parking Institute estimated there are more than 105 million commercial parking spaces in this country. Parking experts differ widely on this figure with ranges from 100 million to 750 million.

Smart city transportation initiatives today include predicting and analyzing traffic flow through analytics, NFC technologies such as smart tags to replace public information displays, more economic sustainability through smart transportation, management of traffic flow and parking within urban cities, SMS system monitors and smart meters.

There are many commonalities within the public and private sector here, with smart transportation as the fastest growing segment within the smart cities market. Challenges such as budget constraints faced by most U.S. cities and residential congestion escalating, citizen demand for technologies is rising high. There is a drive for cities to adopt solutions. A city-wide enterprise architecture can create an ideal platform to solve current challenges.

With this being said, most cities can likely relate to the outlook of smart cities 2014 transportation priorities:

• Modernize urbanization through implementing technologies.

• Education and working together to provide residential data on digital technology.

• Collaborate on solving mass challenges in urbanization.

• Support the adoption and expansion of technologies and smart city transportation solutions.

• Support the advances in automotive technologies and advancing highway technologies.

Linda Lucks, Venice Neighborhood Council president, said in an interview with us:

Advantages of these technologies which make parking more sustainable, efficient, economically beneficial for cities and residents using parking technologies will help, I hope with the reduction of the traffic jams that we are plagued with on every sunny weekend day. Traffic is backed up for at least a mile.

U.S. cities are feeling the pressures to better enable more efficient living in 2014. “Absolutely. Venice is being overdeveloped as the last best place to live by the sea. It is sad that there is the mad dash to buy up our community and transform it to something else," Lucks told Droid Report. "We are in danger of losing the unique thing that made Venice special." She added:

Parking is at a huge premium in every City. Trends I see are charging more mid city as in London, encouraging more biking as is finally being done in LA and we will finally have a rapid transit system back after decimating the one we had until the freeways were built. One of the great tragedies of the lack of foresight in LA is the selling off of some of the railroad right of ways, which traversed the City in my childhood.

Linda Lucks, President of Venice Neighborhood Council

Lucks identified her role as President of the Venice Neighborhood Council:

The City of LA created Neighborhood Councils (NC's) over 10 years ago as a means to engage more people in the political process to develop neighborhood voices beyond existing homeowners groups. Anyone who lives, works, owns property or shows substantial involvement in the community. The intent is to bring more people to the table and give them a voice too. NC members are elected to office by stakeholders who match the description of above and who register to vote. I was elected to be a community rep. and moved up over the last few years to VP and now in my 2nd  two year term as president.

Lucks added that the strategic approach in doing this for Venice’s NC includes the applicable apps on their web page and sends them out in weekly eblasts.  She added, “I doubt that locals use the parking apps, but I may be wrong.  Locals are more likely to use 311,” “The future is here and anything to help with parking is fine with me, including providing more parking at the beach. There are very few beach spaces, whereas Santa Monica has thousands.”

Future plans to expand in the next 5 years the parking app and technologies to other programs according to Lucks:

One new program neighborhood Councils are beginning to use is Nextdoor.com, an easy way for neighbors to stay in touch. I just hope Venice doesn't initiate Santa Monica's two smart meters: when one car leaves, the meter reverts to 0 time. Quite annoying and greedy in my opinion.

A smart cities vision can take up to 5, 10 or 15 years to develop. With the right plan in place, interoperability and collaboration is found developing the city framework. Increasing residential support is important. A strategy allows for future improvements in sustainability. It is important to educate residents on technologies to provide the right understanding. A smart city delivers a valuable approach to innovation and developing the urban environment.

We would like to thank Linda Lucks for taking time for this interview and the Venice Neighborhood Council.