How do you manage parking in a remote location?

Issues on remote car parks

Car parks in remote locations often face several specific problems:

• Sudden surges of visitors on weekends, school holidays or when there’s a sudden bout of nice weather
• Outdated payment and management solutions as to not impact the look of an area
• Potential for poor parking behaviours due to lack of enforcement

These issues can cause congestion, spilling traffic into the surrounding area, leading to increased queues and traffic jams which can spoil the overall look of a location. Outdated solutions also restrict opportunities to generate revenue from a car park, meaning there is less to be reinvested into maintaining a site and supporting the upkeep of an area.

There are simple solutions that can be put in place to expand and enhance the services on a car park. Parking solutions can not only improve how a car park works, but they can also make it into a valuable tool that can support the area.

The importance of proper parking management

Putting management solutions in place can help even remote sites run more efficiently.

For example, switching payment methods from a traditional pay and display model to now accommodate card payments or using pay by phone options can transform how visitors pay for their parking while making life easier for your staff. If there’s no physical cash to collect, this improves security as there is no need to recover change from a machine. This also means you don’t have staff travelling to remote locations to collect revenue, as it’s all automated.

Modernising your payment methods allows a site to be better tailored to the changing ways that the public pay. Since the pandemic, there has been an increasing reliance on card and contactless payments that cannot be ignored. Adapting your site to include them can help encourage more visits, subsequently lifting revenue that can be reinvested into your site, helping to preserve and conserve an area. This is especially important when it comes to taking steps to protect Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) in green belt areas.

ANPR cameras can function as a deterrent not only to problem parking behaviour on your car park but anti-social behaviour in general. For remote sites, where it’s harder to put security in place and potentially cost prohibitive, this can make a huge difference to protecting your car park and other facilities.

Effective car park management also helps to keep traffic moving on and off your site. During those busier periods, where you might see a surge in visitors, this is vital. By enabling your visitors to park easily, pay quickly and leave promptly when they’ve finished a visit, you can support a steady space turnover. This helps reduce queues and congestion in an area, which would otherwise frustrate motorists and residents while ruining the impression someone has of an area of outstanding beauty. The queues of motorists heading to Snowdon during the early days of the pandemic show this problem at its most extreme.