How can your car park cope with sudden crowds?

Don’t get taken by surprise. Use your data

Regardless of sector, your car park is a treasure trove of important data. By utilising ANPR on your site, you can access a range of reporting that provides valuable insight into how your car park performs and how your customers are using it.

This data can give you a clearer picture of when your site’s peaks and troughs are. From a week-on-week overview to building a clear picture of when your peak season is; whether this is a retail charting the rise in customers leading up to the Christmas period or an area of outstanding natural beauty, identifying where the peaks are during the summer months.

Data like this can help you rota in the correct number of staff to support an increase in visitors or show you when you need to have the other solutions in place that can help support larger crowds.

Smarter payments

One way to deal with a surge in visitors is to improve the speed at which they can enter and exit your car park. We call this space turnover and can be supported in several ways. One of the best ways to speed up the interactions with your car park is eliminating steps in the user journey visitors have.

ANPR (Automatic Number Plate Recognition) allows guests to drive onto a site without the need to predict how long their visit will be, queue at a machine and pay for their parking in advance. This means their visit starts quicker, with less stress and without watching the clock, as they only pay for the time they’ve spent on site when they leave.

The approach to exiting can also be streamlined. Instead of visitors looking for change, installing more flexible payment options such as card and contactless payment, or letting guests pay via phone or app, can speed up any queues and allow people to begin their journey home promptly.

These solutions combine to support a steady stream of people arriving and leaving, meaning there should always be spaces to accommodate drivers.

Improve accessibility

Car parks need to accommodate electric vehicles and drivers with different accessibility requirements. This could be anything from blue badge bays to wider spaces to make getting in and out of the car easier for parents with small children.

Congestion on a site can become much worse when these spaces are misused. Especially if your car park is busy, someone may have no choice other than to use potentially multiple spaces to give themselves the room they need to get a wheelchair in and out of their car.

By protecting your priority bays using a Bay Enforcement solution, you can ensure that spaces are available for use whenever they are needed, not just during a rush of visitors. The impact removing even a potential source of congestion can have when a site is busy is noticeable.