A preview of the parking workshop at the SITO annual conference on November 8.
Consultant Alasdair Macmillan, NVQ Project Manager for the British Parking Association, is chairing a workshop at the SITO annual conference on November 8. He is a former president of the BPA.
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Whether you are the security manager of an airport, hospital, supermarket or office, the chances are that part of your site will be a car park. While TV and films have demonised car parks as dark lairs for wrong-doers, much good work has gone into making car parks lighter, securer, and more customer-friendly. As car use keeps on rising, so demand for car parking spaces rises, and end users have to keep up with supply of parking places, and protect what spaces they have. Consultant Alasdair Macmillan points out: ‘It’s real estate. It needs to be managed like any other piece of real estate.’Car parks differ in character depending on what type of building they are serving – the same car park can have different categories of user, with their own security needs. Take hospitals, where visitors may only need to use a car park for a short time, whereas staff need to park for a shift. Such a car park needs to cater for a shift change-over; staff about to start one shift will need to park while staff already on an earlier shift are still parked. From a security point of view, after dark a car park must be well lit for staff walking to and from their cars. At an airport, fliers may be leaving their car for a fortnight, and the car park is as likely to be used by night as by day; in retail, there may be little overnight use. An office car park may only be used in office hours, but there is the problem of unauthorised use – either local residents or city centre users who have no business at the organisation whose car park they are abusing. This brings us to the two ways of controlling use of an off-street car park (whether surface or multi-storey). Alasdair Macmillan says: ‘One is to put a set of barriers on it and issue tickets – a normal multi-storey situation; or the other is to put in a pay and display system and the motorist buys their own ticket.’ The former controls entry and exit by the physical barrier, while the latter relies on patrollers to make sure that cars have valid tickets. For cost reasons, barriers tend to be more widespread in multi-storeys, where they do more work because there are more parking spaces. Whether a car park is surface or multi-storey, security of people and vehicles is a matter of good lighting, CCTV, good patrolling by uniformed parking staff, a limited number of pedestrian entrances, and no hiding places for real (or imaginary) criminals. He praises modern multi-storeys that are well-lit, with clean surfaces that reflect light well, and with good signage, good sight-lines so that users feel comfortable about walking to and from their car, wide and well-kept stairways, and reliable lifts with proper intercoms. ‘Where car parks serve an airport or retailer, operators know the car park is an important part of the whole experience of visiting the place, because customers will come by car and need to be catered for.’Car drivers not only want to park near to where they are going, but demand is outstripping car parking place supply, not only in business districts but residential areas. Hence the need for control – to prevent traffic chaos and to keep open a channel for emergency vehicles. More local authorities are taking over on-street parking regulations enforcement. The NVQ (in Scotland, the SVQ) in parking concentrates on how parking staff on and off-street deal with sometimes irate drivers – how to defuse situations. Staff need also to grasp the details of parking regulations so they know when someone is within the regulations or should be given a penalty ticket.
