DART's paid-parking effort loses jim decicco through six months ...
How much money would DART make from its “experiment” in paid parking at the northern ends of its Red and Green rail lines? And how many customers would this effort chase back onto the freeways?
If these were your questions, the answers might surprise you six months in.
Ridership is flat, but instead of turning a profit, the program is actually losing money so far — or, more accurately, expenses are outpacing revenues by $88,602 through the end of September. And the only way to fix that, apparently, is to expand the program to more lots. Imagine my surprise.
The numbers are found in a status report that Todd Plesko, DART’s vice president for planning and development, prepared for DART board members (link below). Dubbed Fair Share Parking, the pay-to-park plan is designed to ensure that train riders from non-DART cities – which do not charge the 1 percent sales tax DART cities do — pay a bonus tax to fund the transit system, above and beyond the actual fares.
Paid parking went online for the Parker Road (Red Line) and North Carrollton-Frankford Road (Green Line) stations in April. The Northwest Plano Park & Ride was added in July, and the Belt Line Station (Orange Line) is approved for Dec. 3, 2012.
As to ridership, a constant concern for your local editorial board as DART’s numbers remain stagnant, it’s no-harm, no-foul. DART officials had braced themselves to lose as much as 5 percent in ridership, but so far Red Line (north to Plano) numbers are up 0.8 percent and the Green Line (north to Carrollton) is down 0.3 percent.
Given the way DART guesstimates its count today, that’s effectively flat. Instead of asking DART to prove the negative that it could have gained riders over these six months, it’s probably more accurate to assume these two light-rail lines gained as many riders as they lost.
Platinum Parking, the vendor DART hired to manage its paid parking, predicted as much as $1 million a year in revenue, which seemed wildly overstated. DART’s own estimates were far more modest with a lot of wiggle room: $56,000 to $500,000 in the first year.
Instead, paid parking revenue has been fairly constant in the $30,000s range (a high of $39,033 in September and low of $30,099 in July. However, expenses and management fees have exceeded revenue in each of the six months.
The problem, if you support paid parking (which I do not), is that instead of chasing customers away, the $2 daily fee simply caused a lot of train riders to shift to the next good lot south, Trinity Mills Station on the Green Line or George Bush Turnpike Station on the Red.
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As an aside, this is what I did as soon as DART announced the plan. I had been parking at North Carollton but quickly discovered that Trinity Mills was barely a couple of minutes farther from Flower Mound and, in fact, a better lot if walking far isn’t your thing. Before April, Trinity Mills’ lot usually was about two-thirds full on a workday. Today, if you don’t arrive before 8:15 a.m. most days, you are out of luck and have to park across the street at an abandoned home decor store.
That’s the effect on one rider from a non-DART city. But extrapolate that over many riders doing roughly the same thing on both train lines, and you see the issue for DART. The calculation is that it’s worth $2 a day (or maybe $40-ish a month) to drive a little farther.
The other obvious unintended effect is to screw up the Trinity Mills and George Bush lots for DART-member-city riders who already parked there.
Remember the stated goal of the paid-parking experiment:
It’s about fairness
Fares only represent 15% of DART’s total operating budget, most of which comes from the 1-cent sales tax that citizens in the service area pay to DART each time they make a purchase.
The cities in the service area made a commitment when they voted to be a part of DART, and with the paid parking program, DART is ensuring that it honors its commitment to them.
How fair, then, is it to shift vehicles from one lot to another, leaving northernmost lots artificially empty and the next lots south artificially full? DART’s own analysis finds DART-member-city customers displeased with the effects south of the paid lots.
From Plesko’s analysis, it appears DART is not unhappy with Platinum’s management of paid parking. The vendor has worked with DART to reduce expenses significantly, which mostly explains why September was the closest-to-break-even month at minus-$1,509.
And by contract, Platinum eats the loss. According to Plesko, “Platinum collects all of the revenue and must pay for all expenses from the revenue collected. DART receives revenue only if Platinum covers its costs and its fixed fee. If revenue is insufficient to cover Platinum’s costs, Platinum must absorb any losses, not DART. However, until Platinum offsets its costs, DART will not receive any parking revenue.”
From Plesko’s status report: “Despite reductions [to expenses], it is unlikely that the program will be able to break even without changes in the program.”
For riders who shifted to free lots, this is the bad news. DART is considering further cost reductions, but the only real way to push this program into the black is to “expand to nearby lots to capture more non-resident customers who have shifted.”
Like me.
In Plesko’s analysis, charging to park at Trinity Mills, George Bush and Arapaho, along with the stations already in the plan, could increase revenue to the point that the program would go into positive numbers by July 2013.
A cynic, of course, would call this doubling down on a bad idea.
Paid Parking Demo_Planning 102312
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DART's paid-parking effort loses jim decicco through six months ...health insurance hunter
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