Solving the Most Common Parking Challenges

Parking management can be crucial to an efficient and low cost parking system. According to Al Carroll of McCarthy Buildings Co., hiring an inexperienced parking team is the biggest and most costly mistake that property owners can make in parking management.

“Still to this day, we see some owners hiring an inexperienced team of design consultants who may not be experts in the design of this product type,” Carroll, EVP of parking structures, tells GlobeSt.com. “So many times, we see owners paying more for a parking facility because they hired architects and engineers based on past relationships rather than doing their research to find and hire the most highly qualified ones.”

But, that isn’t the only problem putting pressure on parking costs. Owners are also seeing an increase in parking budgets due to construction costs and maintenance costs. “The hot construction market is also putting upward pressure on the cost of labor and materials, which can cause significant budget overruns especially if the design is not efficient,” says Carroll. “Educating owners during their decision making regarding upfront costs vs. long term operating and maintenance costs is always a challenge. For example, there are certain light fixtures and lighting control systems that may cost more up front, but the long term energy cost savings is substantially less. Having a knowledgeable and experienced Design-Build Team that can perform these types of life cycle cost analyses is important to an Owner’s decision making during the design phase.”

Determining the best system all depends on the building function and needs. An office building has different requirements than a shopping center. “A parking facility for office employees needs to be able to load and unload passenger vehicles quickly in the morning during peak arrival times as well as at the end of the day when people leave work to go home which requires a designed to allow employees to travel vertically from floor to floor quickly,” says Carroll. “Office employees are what our industry refers to as repeat offenders.  These are people that come to work every day that are generally creatures of habit that tend to park in the same parking spot day after day and spend very little time if any looking for or traveling to “their” parking space.”

The general public, on the other hand, uses shopping center parking differently. “Most shoppers tend to spend more time way-finding or navigating their way thru the parking facility searching for a convenient parking space,” says Carroll. “Also, there are no peak queuing periods as the majority of shoppers tend to arrive and leave the parking facility throughout the course of the entire day. In these types of parking structures, some owners will provide car counting systems or red-green light parking guidance systems which allow visitors to see how many available spaces there are on each floor level versus which ones are occupied and where they are specifically located. If there are only a few spaces available on the first two floors, most people will go straight to the third floor which may have a lot more spaces available.”

Outside of shopping centers, public spaces like casinos, hotels and hospitals have separate needs for parking. “Parking facilities at gaming casinos will normally have car counting and red/green light parking guidance systems plus speed ramps which reduces travel/way-finding time to an even greater degree,” adds Carroll. “While there are cost premiums for these functional design features, Owners feel it allows their customers more time to shop in the mall and/or gamble in the casino. Parking facilities at hospitals are normally designed to create a pleasant experience for visitors or patients who are typically sick and/or elderly. Oversize parking stalls, high floor to floor heights, higher than normal lighting levels, painted interiors, way-finding devices, parking guidance systems, security, etc. are just several design features to help make their customer’s first and last experience a pleasant one so they’ll keep coming back.”

There are other features that owners can also consider to boost the efficiency of a parking garage. “Some parking structures are designed with double threaded helix type ramping systems in lieu of a single threaded helix. A double threaded helix reduces the travel time required for vehicles to travel from floor to floor by 50%,” says Carroll.