What should you do when there aren’t enough parking spaces on your site?

On the surface not having enough space in your car park might sound like a great problem to have. A busy car park should mean customers, footfall, and revenue, but what if your car park is busy yet your business is quiet? That can signify a problem with abuse on your site which can have major implications for your business.

Or perhaps your business struggles with parking space due to the size of your car park and needs to ensure a much more efficient turnover of spaces?

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There can be nothing more frustrating than making a trip somewhere and being unable to park when you arrive. It can be off-putting for visitors and cause them to turn round and immediately leave. For businesses, it’s worse as this means a customer has tried to visit your premises, left without spending any money and potentially has a severely damaged view of your brand.

In this blog, we’re going to show you how to assess and capitalise on your parking spaces.

Assess the problem

Your first step is to identify if you have a problem with capacity on your site and then consider the solutions in place that can help.

ANPR provides businesses with valuable data relating to a site’s is performance and user behaviour. By looking at the capacity and how long vehicles are parking on your site, you can gain insight into your car park and then compare this with data from within your business. Is your car park busy while your store is quiet? This can be a strong indicator that motorists are leaving their vehicle on your car park and going elsewhere, restricting access for genuine customers.

Maybe your car park is near other pay and display areas, such as a shopping precinct or a hospital. This can leave your site open to potential abuse from those looking for free parking as an alternative to a pay and display site.

Enforce the rules

Once you identify the issues on your site, you can put solutions in place that address them and allow you to improve how your car park operates.

Introducing a maximum stay allows you to take steps to ensure motorists do not park on your site and go elsewhere. ANPR can help automate the monitoring of your site, issuing a parking charge to visitors who overstay. This can have a dramatic effect on parking compliance. On average, we see an 80% improvement on a site over the first three months of a site being live.

Boost space turnover

For a site to be effective, you need to ensure a steady flow of traffic and efficient space turnover. There are several ways you can change how your site performs to do this:

If you have a paid element to your parking, consider expanding your payment methods. By offering contactless and cashless alternatives, you can improve the speed motorists can pay for their parking and even remove the need to queue for payment kiosks from your site altogether. This can help motorists get on and off your car park much more quickly.

You can also leverage ANPR to provide Click & Collect services. When a motorist arrives on site, cameras log their registration number and notifies staff within your business to prepare their order ready for their arrival. This could be brought out to their vehicle or collected in store. The notification makes this process more efficient, giving staff a head start, massively reducing queuing in-store, freeing up more time for staff to support customers and boosting space turnover.

Make the most of the quieter moments

Occupancy data can help you find peaks and troughs in site use. You can compare those busy and quiet periods to your staffing at those times. There may be a consistent peak that you had not accounted for, and you may not have enough staff working to cover that busy period, limiting the effectiveness of the service you offer.

Analysing your occupancy can help you identify your peak trading periods and provide insight into when your business is quieter. By enticing customers to visit your business during these quieter times, you can potentially remove congestion from peak trading times to improve space availability. For example, a gym or health centre could offer cheaper classes or trials to entice visitors at other times, lessening the traffic at peak times while making their services available to a wider audience.

How can we help you make the most of your car park?

There are numerous ways to transform your car park. At Parkingeye, we work alongside your business to tailor the solutions in place to suit you and the changing needs of your customers. Through simple changes and regaining control of your site, it’s possible to lift space turnover, increase the number of vehicles you accommodate and boost footfall, which can have a significant impact on your business and its revenue potential.