How to spot and tackle car park abuse

Spotting poor parking behaviours

Issues on your car park can creep onto the site without you necessarily realising. Keep an eye out for:

• Cars parked right on the edge of your site; this can be an indication of someone who isn’t planning on using your services but just needed somewhere to leave their car.
• Your business being quiet while the car park is busy.
• Your car park is full at what you would expect to be peak trading times, but revenue doesn’t increase.
• You have a high capacity, but revenue from paid parking isn’t what it should be.

These are visual checks you can do that might indicate that you have a problem with poor parking behaviour and your site being abused. To truly identify the size and impact of the problem, you need to delve into your data.

What happens if parking abuse goes unchallenged?

If parking abuse is ignored, then several problems can emerge on site.

Firstly, the number of spaces available for legitimate customers are restricted. This can cause visitors to your site to leave, either parking elsewhere (and generating revenue for someone else) or going to a competing business instead.

If your car park is near a residential area or another parking site, customers might choose to park there instead. This can be problematic for a community as roads suddenly become harder to traverse with additional parked cars on them. This can cause issues within a community which are levelled at your business, doing further harm to your brand reputation.

This leads to the final problem, a drop in customers and footfall. This can contribute to a downturn in sales and revenue, which in its simplest terms, can put a business in serious jeopardy.