Mall Parking - circulating cars are not shoppers.

New article in Parking Africa.




Link to Mall Parking

'Go-for-Goldilocks' - Free Parking Not the Best Way to Attract Shoppers?

'Go-for-Goldilocks'

Parking is not the main reason people go shopping, in fact it is well down the list, but retailers would make you think that it is the only thing that is between them and oblivion.

The best option, is to 'Go-for-Goldilocks'.  That is change your pricing and/or restrictions to get the right number of cars in the right number of spaces.

You may have read a previous blog where I mentioned that if you have an overload situation, as you do in many suburban malls, having cars circulating in car parks does NOT increase the number of shoppers; you have shoppers plus motorists waiting to be shoppers, and hating the experience being provided.


















The best way to approach parking for shoppers is to get the time restriction right and then to enforce that.  You can get more shoppers by turning your parking bays over faster, not by increased queuing.


Free Parking Not the Best Way to Attract Shoppers?


Kevin Warwood

Mall Parking - people in circulating cars are not shoppers, they’re people circulating in cars!

100% parking performance is difficult to achieve.  To demonstrate this, picture a row of car parks.  Each car park has a car in it.  As a car pulls out, another parks and takes its place, with no queuing, no double parking and no vacancy.  This is the right number of customers that the car park resource can funnel into the mall.  Too many cars, resulting in double parking and circulating, is a system where the managers don’t have the car park resource operating correctly.  Circulating cars are not shoppers, they’re people sitting in circulating in cars!

In 2008, we were running a trial on parking enforcement in a mall in South Auckland.  The mall owner was keen to see how our new ‘camera car’ was working so we started to use the mall as a trial.  One part of the mall had a P90 restriction as it was adjacent to the local Courts, whose customers were parking in the mall.  The rest of the car park had staff dotted around and clogging up the best car parks during the day.  Turning over car parks is one of the best ways of increasing through-put of customers per car park and these two groups of people were lowering the car park turnover and consequently causing a lower number of customers through the mall. 

The car was fitted with two cameras mounted on the roof.  The car would slowly work its way up the aisle and then in 90 minutes, come back to do it again.  The abuse was incredible.  The enforcement numbers climbed dramatically and so did the revenue to the mall owner.  The phone call volumes to the mall management office and the parking turnover climbed as well.  This was a major shift away from the car park being self managing to an active management style.  The system created free car parks for customers but also generated complaints.  In the end, the mall company relented and asked us to slow the enforcement down a bit.

Mall owners have constantly said to me that when I want to raise a price to slow down the flow of cars into a mall car park because there are circulating cars, double parking, rage incidents and property damage occurring due to congestion, then it will somehow hurt the mall’s business.  The approach is to clear out the car park of all those who are not adding value to the mall, to make room for those who are adding value.  That means staff, people who are parking from neighbouring sites and contractors, should be moved on or asked to pay, so as to raise their value to equal that of the shopping customer.  It must be learnt that people circulating in cars are NOT customers,  they are just people circulating in cars in your car park because your car park is not efficiently run and it is acting as a bottle neck to your business.  Clearing out those who add less value is a sensible business decision.  High performance parking in malls is also a sensible business decision.

Parking performance is simple enough to implement, even a poor mans version.  It’s the collection of data to see how well your car park is operating, then analysing the peaks and troughs, dividing your car parks up into zones, the distribution of high value customers to the best spaces and the restriction through price, time restriction or parking equipment to lower value customers to those spaces. 

The best solution is to have exactly the right number of people parked in exactly the right number of car parks, with no circulating, double parking or vacancy …. for as long a period during the day as you can get.  Customers will be happier, retailers will be happier and people may enjoy going to your mall.

By Kevin Warwood, parking specialist

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Hospital Parking – Why paying for hospital parking is good for you

Charles Gordon of Ottawa this Week gives us an interesting perspective on the paying for parking at the Hospital discussion that has been raging in Canada for some weeks now since the report from the healthcare professionals claimed that paying for parking was hindering the patient’s ability to get well.  This would almost be satirical if it wasn't so true.  He sheds some 'common sense' light on the situation and places hospital parking in with its peers, airports, churches, shopping centres and universities .... that is, places where people will bring their cars and owners who need the revenue.

CHARLES GORDON / Ottawa This Week
Dec 08, 2011 - 8:57 AM

Why paying for hospital parking is good for you

Among the many arguments presented so far in the Great Hospital Parking debate is this one: If hospital parking were free, everyone would use it – doctors, nurses, volunteers, friends of people in the neighbourhood and people stashing their cars before catching the bus downtown. This would mean no parking left for patients and people visiting them.
If you turn the argument on its head, it means this: The only way to ensure that there is parking for hospital patients and visitors is to charge for it.
We have developed an extremely advanced and sophisticated society if we can come up with theories like this. In fact, it is a sure sign that we have moved well past Nineteen Eighty-Four, our slogan now being not “Freedom is Slavery” but “Free Parking is No Parking.”
A further 1984ish argument has also been published: namely that making parking free would encourage more people to drive, thus causing damage to the environment. “Paying for Parking Means Cleaner Air,” the slogan could read.
All of this comes about because the Canadian Medical Association Journal printed an editorial advocating the elimination of hospital parking fees, on the grounds that they constituted a barrier to health care, a hidden user fee and, therefore, a possible violation of the Canada Health Act.
Predictably, everyone has reacted because nothing gets Canadians more riled up than parking, with the possible exception of snow removal. And perhaps cable TV costs.
Horror stories abound, and you will have lived through some of them, particularly if a loved one has spent an extended time in hospital and you visited frequently. Doctors quoted by the Journal tell of patients who are more focused on parking fees than on what the doctor is telling them, or who even rush off before a full consultation because they don’t want to pay another hour’s worth of parking fees.
The hospitals say that they need the revenue. It is a tidy sum, although a small fraction of their overall costs. That it is necessary is the result of the province not giving them enough money. The provinces, meanwhile, won’t give hospitals the money because the feds won’t give the provinces enough money.
So, to reduce that to terms we can all understand, we are paying $13 for parking because the provincial and federal governments want to balance their budgets.
Not that they are having any success with that.
The conclusion to be drawn is that if we want hospitals to give us free parking we will have to help them find ways to raise more money. But how? They’re already selling handicrafts in the lobby, renting out space to donut shops, putting donors’ names on stuff, running galas and who knows what else. Perhaps they could sell chocolate bars. Perhaps they already do.
It is probably out of the question to bring back pay toilets.
The irony of it all is that many of the complaints about paying for hospital parking spaces would disappear if it were actually possible to find them. True, at some hospitals, such as the Riverside, parking seems ample, but at others, such as the Civic, parking is literally and figuratively at a premium.
If you could find a spot, and fairly close, you probably wouldn’t mind as much paying for it.
There are places you pay to park and places you don’t and there is not much sense in it. As some have pointed out, you don’t pay to park at the church or synagogue. Or the shopping centre – yet. On the other hand, they charge you to park at the airport and the train station. Why do they do that?
Answer: Because they can.
The hospital is in the same position. Going there isn’t optional. You go there because you have to and you pay whatever. Don’t forget that it helps the environment.