Parking fines

Parking at Canberra Airport is a cinch. You drive up to the boom gate, roll down your window, take the ticket and park. To leave, it’s a matter of taking the ticket to the ticket machine, putting in your coins, driving back to the boom gate and inserting the ticket.

Parking along the Kingston Foreshore is even easier. There is no tollgate, and if you want, there is no ticket machine either. The carpark uses an app called Parkmobile. It allows you to pay for your parking through your mobile phone. No more paper tickets. No more coins.

At the Westfield in Belconnen, it’s easier again. There, license plate recognition technology circumvents not just the need for tickets and coins, but also apps.

It seems like the only step remaining is to automate the parking process altogether. Which doesn’t seem too far off given he developments in driverless vehicles?

Boom gates have been automated for a long, long time. So long in fact, that when you are served by a human, it seems quite novel.

Welcome to Adelaide. Many of city’s major UPark parking stations are still manually operated. Exiting the carpark means having to engage with a cashier in a booth. According to the last Census, South Australia still employs about 200 hundred car park attendants — more than any other state on a per capita basis.

How can this be? How can we in the ACT be the beneficiaries of several technological platforms trying to out automate one another, while in SA, boom gate operator is still a profession?

My guess (/untested hunch) is this. Canberra’s average unemployment rate over the last 10 years in Canberra was 3.7 per cent. It was 6.0 per cent in South Australia. Canberra’s median income is about $61,000, compared to Adelaide’s $45,000. And in the ACT, 41 per cent have a Bachelor’s degree or more, compared to only 22 per cent in Adelaide.

By all accounts, Canberra’s labour market is both much thinner and much more expensive than Adelaide’s. It’s much harder and costly to operate a manual parking operation so the investment in labour-saving technology shouldn’t be surprising.

On the flip side, owners of parking stations have less incentive to automate in low-wage Adelaide than they do in high-wage Canberra. Even when technologies can be bought off the shelf, an investment is still required to refurbish an existing site, and this can be expensive.

In the absence of technology, labour has a monopoly over the supply of skills, and is able to demand a premium. When a new technology is developed, labour’s monopoly status is broken and is forced to compete. Competition eats away at that premium and pushes wages down. In doing so, manual processes remain viable for at least a little while longer.

Headlines that warning about the sudden robofication of jobs fail to recognise the role of economic “circuit breakers”. Prices change, consumers respond, firms emerge, firms go out of business, wages rise and fall. And all of this happens in a way that tempers how the economy responds to sudden shocks.

If anything these circuit breakers are working too well at the moment. Real wage growth in Australia is currently the lowest on record, and many other countries are experiencing similar results. The Economist writes that “It seems clear that a squeeze on real wages in recent years has meant that some companies have been happy to employ more workers rather than buy productivity-enhancing machines.” In a recent report for Google, AlphaBeta write that there’s about $2.2 trillion being left on the table in Australia from unautomated processes <insert either eye-popping or eye-rolling emoji here>.

Fully realising the potential of new digital technologies may be some time off while labour remains so cheap.