With over 350,000 visitors to The Birmingham Botanical Gardens every year, parking spaces, particularly in peak seasons, can become limited. However, the management team at the Botanical Gardens have noticed a growing number of non-visitors using the free parking facilities but going elsewhere. To tackle the problem, yet continue to provide a free service to visitors and the neighbouring community, Creative Car Park, a parking management company, has provided a solution by installing an ANPR system (Automatic Number Plate Recognition) to monitor the car park.
The system has been programmed to allow one free hour to anyone, whether entering the gardens or not, enabling the local community such as users from the nearby school or college to continue benefitting from the service. Visitors to the Botanical Gardens will be given free unlimited parking when they enter their registration number at the ticket desk on entry.
The contract to manage the car park, in conjunction with Botanical Gardens, was awarded to Creative Car Park because of the company’s experience in adapting established management systems to the bespoke needs of individual sites. A spokesperson for Creative says “The Botanical Gardens were keen to uphold the needs of the local community but also ensure their car park was being used for the right purpose so that everyone got maximum use. Our operations and surveying teams have worked together to devise a parking system which everyone will benefit from.”
Previously, there was no parking system in place but the new ANPR system will identify vehicles when they enter and leave the car park to ensure those parking all day are genuine visitors to the gardens.
CREATIVE CAR PARK:
Operates in more than 700 car parks nationwide include shopping centres, retail parks, railways and supermarkets
Major clients include Knight Frank, Jones Lang LaSalle, MJMapp, Morrisons, The co-operative, Royal London Insurance
