JVH

 I’ve spent the last few days pulling together articles for PT February. It doubles as the program for PIE, and I am becoming very familiar with the speakers and sessions. The names are icons in our industry — Tom Wunk, Dennis Cunning, Brandy Stanley, Julie Dixon, Mark Braibranti, Thomas Hartley, Mike Harley, Matt Darst, Barbara Chance, and those are just the ones that wrote articles in PT Feb.

In addition, we have Dale Denda, Mike King, Bob Harkins, Bob Kane, Mark Lawrence, and Graham Arndt, flying in from Australia.

Plus many more.

It promises to be an exciting and

excellent learning experience for all, attendees and vendors.

Be there as Barbara untangles “Spaghetti Technology,” or Mike tells you how to apply dynamic pricing like hotels and airlines use to parking. Matt calls upon his philosophic side with a presentation entitled Ce N'est Pas un Pipe. I’m told its in English, but with Matt,

who knows? 

Dennis takes off his gloves as he delves into the murky world of Management Agreements. Come find out why operators break out in cold sweats when he is around. Tom reprises Technology Camp. And he good at it. He should be, I hired him once, in another life.

Julie Dixon and her crew put on a number of seminars focused on the ins and outs of on street parking and enforcement. She has the chops to do it, she was hip deep in SF Park, ran enforcement for West Hollywood, and now is practically everywhere cities need parking help. Don’t miss this one.

Brandy has been pressed into service leading one of their CPP seminars. With her background in operations plus having run two major cities, currently Las Vegas, she is the perfect pick.

Big Data raises its head in two seminars as Blake Laufer from T2 discusses its use in on street and enforcement applications, and how it factors into transportation will be discussed by Cubic Data System.

Ex-Disney employee Thomas Harley brings his customer service experience working for Mickey combined with his current gig running parking and transportation at Florida International University to his seminar on customer service and parking.

Of course, no PIE would be complete without Dale Denda holding forth on the economy, construction, and the financial health of our industry.

And that only scratches the surface.  Add seminars on onstreet technology, speed networking, a fantastic birthday bash to celebrate Parking Today’s 20th anniversary, and parking talk forever.

PIE 2016 is the happening place for our industry for this year. See you in Las Vegas, Feb  28 through March 2. 

 

My friend down the street who owns the Tesla and the Porsche took her daughter to a local shopping mall on Christmas Eve to pick up a last-minute gift. She took the Porsche.

Naturally, the parking lot was jammed. Not a space to be had.  Then she spotted three empty spaces, near the entrance. They were charging stations for electric vehicles. She had taken the wrong car. She drove home, switched cars, returned and parked.

She was laughing in telling the story as we chatted over her front fence. She said that she never thought when buying the six-figure vehicle that she was getting priority parking along with it!

The question is, should she? Because my neighbor was fortunate enough to be able to afford a more expensive car than most of us, does that give her the priority to park conveniently?

The egalitarian side of me says no. However, it’s the mall’s parking lot, and they can do with it what they will. If they want to limit the number of available spaces in their facility, so be it.  They may upset a thousand drivers trying to park their Belchfire V12s, but they will keep my neighbor happy. It’s the way of

the world.

I wonder if there is a government requirement in Los Angeles to mandate a few charging stations in each parking garage. I wouldn’t doubt it. 

 

As we begin 2016 I am honored and gratified to have been at the helm of Parking Today since its inception in 1996. The two decades have been challenging, but also rewarding, not necessarily financially, but in the depth of the friendships that we have developed with our customers and readers of the years.

We started our first year printing every other month, then grew to 10 times a year, then every month and never looked back. This would

have been impossible without the support of the industry, both consumers and vendors. 

When you sit in an office and create content, often out of whole cloth, you forget what an impact you can have. I began to realize that people actually read our stuff when one advertisers told me that he knew when PT was on the streets. His phone began to ring. Another event was when a major error crept into our pages, and I was called about it 10 minutes after our on line edition went up, before the print edition was on the press. I was able to make the correction and all was well.

Creating a magazine every month is the best job there is. We can have one that is suitable for lining a bird cage one month, and win a Pulitzer the next. We can start over every month. If we blow it, we can fix it. 

Throughout the next year I will be reminiscing here about some of the good, bad, and ugly events that have combined to make us who we are. I look forward to another two decades sharing the news and information that our industry has to offer.