I recently moved from Chicago, IL, USA to Calgary, AB, Canada. Jury’s still out on whether or not trading the El for the C-Train, pizza and hot dogs for Vietnamese subs, or the lake for the mountains (which have their own lakes!) is worth it …. but one thing’s for sure: I’m really happy with my new job as  Usability Specialist with a company called SMART Technologies,  responsible for  many excellent educational technology hardware and software products, most popularly the SMART Board.

But this post is not about SMART (maybe I’ll write one in the future), it’s about parking in Calgary (something I try to not have to do too much of, but there’s just no way around using a car here). Nothing too insightful here, just a funny parking experience I had and also a  kudos to the city-wide parking system, ParkPlus.

The Bad

It took about a million weeks for my car to ship from Chicago -> Calgary (which is funny as my stuff got here in about one). Once it arrived here, I had to visit around eight different places (government offices, registries, dealerships) in order for my car to be blessed as kosher in Alberta. In any event, there was a period where I had a rental car and my imported Volkswagen and had to strategically shuttle them around so I could take the latter to get inspected and then use the former to get home. A funny thing happened when I tried to park them both in the same lot, using my credit card in the automated parking machine. I swiped my card, paid for a couple hours worth of parking for one car, then went to dip my card again, and got the following error message.

It took my quite a while to figure out what the heck was going on here. I eventually just assumed that my credit card info was stored in some central parking database which doesn’t allow one to have multiple simultaneous sessions on the same card. Understandable … it’s an edge use case …. but I still couldn’t figure out what was the rationale for disallowing this. But … what about that error message, huh? Gotta be one of the best I’ve seen. How about ‘Session in Progress’ or ‘Try Different Card’ ? To me, “Impossible Payment” implies that I tried to pay for -i or 1/0 hours of parking time, or attempted to pay with my blockbuster card. I scrounged up enough loonies to pay with cold hard, cash. It didn’t seem to have any problem with that.

The Good

Not that I enjoy paying for parking — especially at work — but if I have to pay, I want it to be as painless as possible. The ParkPlus system makes parking so easy, you don’t even car that you’re getting ripped off!

Here’s how it works. These payment boxes have sprung up all over the city, and many of the streets have signs with zone numbers posted along them. You park your car somewhere, find the nearest box enter the zone number where you’ve parked your car, dip your credit card and you’re done.  Pretty easy, and ingenious for ParkPlus because adding a new zone is as easy as putting up a pole with a number — no need to install a quarter-based parking meter for every parking spot.

Well, the streets around my work building are Park-Plus-ified, and I’d seen signs advertising a way to pay with your mobile. So one day, instead of walking the extra 250 feet past the front door to the machine, I decided I’d pay with my mobile. I navigated to parkplus.ca with my mobile phone and found it to be not a mobile-optimized site, and I was a bit confused by this. When I got to my desk, I spent some more time navigating around the site from my browser on my PC, and as it turns out, you actually need to call a phone number from your phone to pay for parking — how adorably quaint!! The website is only used to create an account and for you to add money to that account.

Paying exorbitant fees every month to Fido for use of their mobile internet, I was a bit upset that there wasn’t a web site — or better yet a mobile app — I could use to do this, but I thought I’d put some money in my ParkPlus account and give it a go using the ‘ol Dialer app on my Android Phone.  It’s a pretty fluid interaction:

• Place the call
• Press 1 to create a new parking session or cancel current one
• Enter zone number
• System reads it back, press 1 to confirm
• It thanks me, tells me when my session expires and hangs up.

Total time expended ….. 33 seconds. That’s pretty great (as great as paying for parking gets), and quite the relief after having used Fido’s ridiculously inefficient voicemail system. I hope to post more on this later.

Sad fun fact of the day: ParkPlus is at the top of my mobile’s automatically generated ‘Favorites’ list (based on frequency of calls).

But I was still somewhat reluctant to not have a car at all. There are always, after all, those occasions where you could walk, run, take a train or bus, but life is so much easier if you have a car (IKEA, huge food shoppings and weekend getaways come to mind). So I had my car shipped out here, and over the course of a couple of months, it became clear to me the couple of times a month I actually used it did not nearly justify the cost of insurance, parking and payments (on the order of $600 a month). My father, whose at-the-tine-current car’s lease was coming up, graciously took over payments on it

A couple of months later, when my girlfriend came out here, we thought that since her car was already paid off, perhaps the reduced cost of ownership (insurance + parking) would make keeping a car in the city cost-effective. But, perhaps partly because we both enjoy walking so much, we ended up using the car even less, and even at a cost of $300 a month, for the once or twice we used the car, it just wasn’t really worth it. Her parents gladly took it off our hands and drove it back to New York.

Lesson learned: regardless of additional costs, the cost of mere parking alone (~$200 in downtown Chicago) is enough to make owning a seldomly-driven car very cost-ineffective. 

***

I’d heard a lot about car sharing services such as Zipcar and I-GO, which seemed like viable options for those “life is so much easier with a car” moments. After a bit of research on the web, we decided on I-GO; while the prices seemed pretty comparable, we preferred I-GO because it uses only energy-efficient vehicles (seemed to be in the spirit of the whole car sharing thing), and is a local not-for-profit organization.

While I could go on and on about why I think that car sharing is so nifty and progressive, the intent of this post is to look at I-GO from a service design and usability perspective, so I’ll save all that other idealist rambling for another time.

I’ve posted a Flickr photoset which shows some of the key components of the I-GO service, how they all fit together, and details some of the steps involved in using a car from the time you pick it up until the time you drop it off (I don’t get into the reservation process).

I-GO car parked in dedicated spot at Merchandise Mart

My overall impression is that the whole process is a bit overwhelming the first time around, but certainly manageable, and gets drastically easier to navigate with subsequent uses. Here, in no particular order, are some thoughts about my experience using I-GO thus far (I’ve used on two occasions for a total of three hours):

Perceived complexity

To be honest, I was pretty nervous the first time I took out a car. There is something inherently nerve-wracking about driving “someone else’s car,” and this feeling is magnified when their are novel procedures and novel artifacts to deal with. It’s not just a matter of learning how to use a key fob and getting familiar with the layout of a different car; beyond that, there are many other components in the ecosystem that you must manage or interact with: the I-GO card,  the card reader, and the console, to name a few.

The instructions on the I-GO site are clear and pretty simple, and they’ve even put together a concise quick-start Go Guide. Despite the excellent documentation, howeever, the inherent stress in driving an unfamiliar vehicle (and a Prius, nonetheless, it’s like a space pod) combined with the specialized equipment and new procedure made it such that the first time around was kind of stressful. Fortunately, there weren’t any actual hangups. The second time I took out the car, things seemed a whole lot easier as I started to become familiar with how things work.

Revamp the Keypad

I’ve only been a member of I-GO for a couple of months, apparently the keypad (what I’ve been calling the console) is new as of May 2007. I’m not sure what served this function prior to the rehaul.

Barring an emergency, the interaction with the keypad is fairly minimal: you need to remove the key fob from it at the outset of your reservation, and confirm that you’re back at the drop-off point and re-insert the key fob to complete your trip. But to be honest, it’s a pretty intimidating -looking device:

I-GO car keypad

 
  As I point out in the walkthrough on Flickr, they keypad’s screen is actually very helpful in giving step-by-step directions, giving you instructions for what the possible next actions are based on the current situtation (car started, car stopped, at final location, etc.) I’m sure that there are security concerns, and it is necessary to stash the keypad in the glove compartment, instead of keeping it out on the dashboard. Additionally, I realize that they wanted one solution to work with the many different models of cars in the I-GO fleet, and this is probably the best lowest-common-denominator option to deliver all the required functionality (e.g. as opposed to something specifically designed for the Prius which wouldn’t work in a Honda Fit).

Mix of high-tech, low-tech, and honor system

I’m really impressed with the way that I-GO has employed a mix of digital and analog solutions to handle all the core activities that comprise the overall act of ‘driving a car.’  Some things are managed by technology (the initial unlocking and final locking of the car with the key card), while others rely on more low-tech solutions (writing up a report about pre-existing damage on a carbon-copy paper pad).

Damage reports note pad

Driver's-side visor holds monthly parking keycard

In addition, there is a code of  ’rules’ that members must follow, so that the whole shared car arrangement runs smoothly. To give an example, if a car you’ve taken out runs below 1/4 tank of gas, you’re required to fill it up. You aren’t required to pay for the gas (that cost is covered by a supplied gas card), but you’re required to actually fill it up. There’s also rules like no pets without carriers, report pre-existing damage before you take out the car, make sure to clean up the car after use, etc. Because there’s no direct oversight — no one’s waiting  for you at the drop-off to check things out — it’s probably possible to get away with some minor infractions without being caught (and having to pay a fee), but things seem to get along pretty well with the existing system of rules; all the cars I’ve been in seem to be in great shape.

In a sense, this feels like a Frankenstein solution: many small individual parts cobbled together to make a coherent whole.  It’s a delicate balance, but one that works surprisingly well.  I would hope that a sense of shared ownership (after all, that’s what it is) and having a stake in such an exciting new revolution, would be enough to overcome the commons syndrome. 

I’d be interested to see how the service evolves over time. As new technologies become available, will they be integrated into the system to replace some of the current use cases which depend on the more low-tech or honor system solutions?

Changes the way I drive … and more

Perhaps the most importnat, and the most interesting effect of having used the I-GO service is that it really changes the way I drive, and how I view driving and cars.

A car is no longer a commodity, but a treat, to be reserved for special occasions. In fact, when I drive a car now, it feels too easy – like I’m cheating – like I should be walking instead. The act of driving is now a very conscious decision, one that can not be made on the spur of the moment, but which must be planned ahead of time, almost (but not quite as complicated) as booking a train or a flight. 

It really makes you think: must I drive, or can I just walk instead? And if I must drive, then I need to plan very carefully, because I need to know ahead of time how long it will take me and thus for how long to reserve a car. It forces me to aggregate multiple errands into one trip to carefully choose my destination and to plot out routes.

Another unintended, but nevertheless much welcome, side-effect of this required planning is that, if my destination involves shopping, I am forced to be much more efficient in choosing whatever it is I’m buying. No more prolonged unnecessary deliberation about over trivial decisions is definitely a good thing (see my post on The Paradox of Choice for more on this).

In summary 

Try I-GO. Even if you have a car that you’re contemplating getting rid of, sign up for a trial (there are many plans which don’t require a financial commitment) and see if it’s right for you. It’s easy to use (as I hope I’ve shown), it’s affordable, and though it sounds kind of twisted, not driving very often actually makes it quite fun (especially if you’re driving a Prius). And if you’re on the fence, not sure if you can survive in the city without a car, then challenge yourself (I bet you can!).  You’ll be able to adapt — and with all the money saved, the extra miles walked, and the carbon emissions spared, you will be glad you did.