Improving accessibility on car parks A car park exists to make life easier for customers and visitors to a site. Sometimes motorists need more than a standard parking space, with priority spaces set aside for electric vehicles, blue badge holders and parents with young children. Accessibility is a huge part of making sure someone can travel conveniently and access the businesses and services that matter to them. Any issues on a car park that affect this accessibility can have a negative effect on someone’s overall experience with a business or brand. Thankfully, there are ways to make sure you’re capitalising on the accessibility efforts in place on your car park. Explore more How many priority spaces do you need? There are no specific rules in place dictating the number of disabled and priority spaces needed on a car park. However, The Equality Act 2010 does highlight the need to make reasonable adjustments to remove issues that hamper accessibility for people with disabilities including making sure they can park their vehicle safely and conveniently. Disabled Motoring UK suggest that the number of designated bays for disabled drivers should be proportional to the size of your car park. For example, their guidelines suggest, on a 1000 space car park, you should be looking at 6 spaces plus an additional 3% of your total car parking spaces. 36 out of 1000 parking spaces doesn’t seem like much. Any abuse of those bays is damaging. The space set aside isn’t a lot so it’s vital it can be used for its intended purpose. What sort of impact does abuse have on priority spaces? If a priority space is being used by someone who doesn’t need to be parking there, then they’re making parking and interacting with a business or service significantly more difficult for someone who does. This can lead to stress and frustration for the motorist who would benefit from the space, damaging their experience with a business and potentially leading to complaints. For a business, there’s also the time taken to put these problems right. From manually policing your priority bays, dealing with complaints, finding the customers that are abusing the space, and getting them to move their vehicle. This is time that could be better spent on other tasks and creates awkward and easily avoidable situations for staff. The impact of an unavailable bay can be vast to a disabled user. They are forced into a different area of the car park, causing issues with the distance needed to travel to an appointment or to simply access services. The difference between the size of bays can also make getting access to essential equipment such as wheelchairs incredibly difficult. Blue badge spaces are there to make accessibility easier, if those spaces are being abused it’s the same as the space not being there to begin with. How does Bay Enforcement help? By adding Bay Enforcement to your car park, you’re able to protect your priority spaces, ensuring they are only used by those who are authorised to. Bay Enforcement works by applying the ANPR protection that covers general entry and exit to a car park to a specific area helping stop those prime locations within a car park from being abused, as PCNs can be issued to those misusing bays as a deterrent. This not only makes sure that priority spaces are more readily available, helping a limited number of spaces go further. But this also helps to cut a major source of complaints and customer frustration, freeing up time for staff and making their day easier. Helping you to transform your car park We’re able to help you protect specific spaces across your parking estate, helping to ensure that accessible bays are available when needed and helping to protect key areas, such as VIP spaces, blue badge bays or even dedicated spaces for emergency vehicles. See how Bay Enforcement can help your car park… Our Bay Enforcement solution uses powerful ANPR technology, housed in a monitoring bollard supplying numerous options, which can be tailored to your specific site and requirements. To find out more about Bay Enforcement and how it can help improve accessibility on your car park get in touch using the form… First name *Last name *Email *Telephone NumberCompany *Postcode *MessageBy submitting this form, you are confirming that you have read and accept the Privacy Policy, Terms & Conditions and consent to your data being processed and used for the purpose of reviewing and responding to this enquiry.Keep me updated with information from Parkingeye relating to my enquiry.YesNo SubmitPlease do not fill in this field.
