Although we’re often seen as a parking enforcement agency, we do far more for our customers than simply issuing parking charge notices.
In fact, the actual enforcement of parking charges and car park restrictions is just a small part of the services we provide to the businesses and organisations we work with.
One of the most important areas we address when working with a new client is that of usage.
Monitoring usage and gathering data
The biggest car parking challenge that many large organisations face is finding the balance between the correct use of car parks.
Big institutions like universities, colleges, hospitals and large business parks often have multiple car parks on site. But they have several different groups of stakeholders who use these car parks – from staff and students to guests and visitors.
Determining who can park where is often a random decision made by an architect or a planner many years ago. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.
But with our parking management solutions, we can help you identify exactly how your car parks should be assigned and used – based on solid, real world data.
With ANPR systems (Automatic Number Plate Recognition), we can precisely track and monitor the number of vehicles coming and going from your car parks. We can see typical usage figure – such as length of stay and frequency of visits – and we can count exactly how many cars use your car park each day.
Changing restrictions with car park management
This data gives you a comprehensive overview of your current car park usage. When we couple this with on-the-ground reports from parking wardens and anecdotal evidence from your stakeholders, we can identify what’s working for your organisation, and what isn’t.
It might be that the car park you’ve earmarked for NHS staff at a hospital is too big, with spaces regularly left empty that could be used for visitors.
Or it could be that students at a university are often parking in restricted areas and on the side of roads, even though a large visitor car park is left empty – only ever used at weekends and during special events.
By analysing this data, we can make recommendations on how different car parks should be used in the future, and help you to implement a change in restrictions and usage on-site.
The long term benefits of this are clear: not only will you be meeting customer demand and keeping stakeholders happy, but you’ll also be able to increase your revenue.
If you give your largest car parks over to the largest group of users, you’ll be maximising the potential for paid permits. For example in a university scenario, if students have a large on-site car park where they know they’ll get a spot, they’ll be far more likely to buy an annual permit or pay a daily rate than worry about finding a place on a restricted side street and getting a parking charge notice.
Creating priority parking for those whose need it
By monitoring specific usage of your car parks, we can also provide parking management solutions that give priority to the users who need it most.
This might be a dedicated area for directors or senior stakeholders, who aren’t regular visitors to a business but who might otherwise struggle to find somewhere to park. Or it could be the creation of additional disabled parking spaces, after noting that your current blue badge parking areas are always full.
We can even track length of usage, and identify those staff members who might regularly stay longer than others. These can then be given special permits to account for their longer hours.
It’s one of the great features of our car park permit system, where the issuing of permits can be prioritised to those who need them more than others; they may live the furthest away, work unsociable hours or be unable to access public transport.
However you decide to set-up your car parks and your car park permits, we can provide the data and the insights to improve their usage with our bespoke parking management solutions.
Simply get in touch to start tracking usage and collecting data today.
