Why Parking Management is an Important Investment For Your Company
If you run a business with a physical location, let’s say a busy downtown area, managing and maximizing your parking is going to be a difficult task for you. Businesses see it all the time where customers for a particular business will take all the parking spots for another business. Sure, businesses will paint signs on parking spaces that say “Reserved for (business name) customers,” but this isn’t a sustainable way to manage parking for your business… To truly manage the parking for your brick-and-mortar business, you’re going to need to invest in a parking management system.
If your business is located in an area where parking is poor or overly crowded, it’s going to make it hard for customers to come to your establishment, and driving around in circles searching for a parking spot to open up is not an ideal scenario for your customers, so you have to figure out some type of parking solution.
In the past, businesses hired parking enforcement officers to watch over parking lots to make sure people were following the parking rules and regulations. If a violation was noticed, the officer would place a violation ticket on the windshield of the car so the owner of the vehicle knew to expect a fine in the mail.
This is a method that some businesses still use today but very few do because it comes with a lot of problems:
- It gets pretty expensive to hire parking enforcement officers
- Identifying violations isn’t easy
- Requires constant monitoring of the parking lot so any distractions can deter catching violations
- There’s no guarantee of the vigilance level of each officer
So as you can see, when parking fees are part of a business’s profits, it needs a system in place where there’s a guarantee no money will be missed. Businesses have now turned to remote parking management to provide a higher level of service at a lower cost.
Parking Management Perks
How many times have you been downtown looking for parking and found a parking lot but you had to go up to a machine, reserve a parking time frame, insert your debit or credit card, and then given a ticket to put in your windshield. This is what you would call a remote parking management system.
This is actually a form of technology that’s effectively tackling the parking challenges faced by many businesses. These parking management systems have cameras in place to capture vehicle leaving the parking lot, it has software to recognize license plate information, and it even time stamps a photo of the vehicle and the plate information.
This technology is doing leaps and bounds more than what a parking enforcement officer could do! In order for a parking enforcement officer to be able to do what parking management systems do, it would require more than one officer working, lots of legal pads or spreadsheets to manually write down the cars in each parking spot from the time they park to the time they leave, and to keep track of how much customers paid to park and their payment method.
All of this sounds pretty exhausting, right? That’s because it is. Since the emergence of remote parking management systems, businesses have not only been able to flourish from their ROI but they’ve also improved on their security measures as well. Prior to parking management systems, thefts of actual cars and theft from cars were extremely high.
You may not realize it but there a more types of theft in a retail environment besides shoplifting and employee theft. Car theft is very prominent and typically occurs when cars are parked on the street or on the actual property of homeowners simply because those are just typical locations to find cars. However, the risk of car theft is much greater when cars are parked in/on parking facilities when being charged per hour.
This is because parking enforcement officer booths are positioned in bad spots, the parking lots are sometimes poorly lit, and depending on the size of the lot, it could pose blind spots where officers aren’t able to see the cars to well. All of these factors result from human error.
In your efforts to improve your parking, there is definitely a need for parking management with brick-and-mortar businesses. You just have to make the decision of whether or not it’s a good investment for your business.
