Parking is a massive global issue. By 2050, 70% of the world\u2019s population will live in cities, yet our cities don\u2019t have enough space to grow? The fact of the matter is that there are 100 football pitches worth of land in Manhattan alone, crying out to be developed and the beauty is that developing them into housing, community facilities, sports pitches and transport infrastructure and nobody will even notice.
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Where is all this land? It\u2019s currently designated as under-used car parking space. In every city in the developed world, experts estimate that there are 3 parking spaces for every 1 car. Every time I tell this to someone, they say \u201cWell not in my city, parking is a nightmare\u201d. I can tell you it is in your city. Every day as you desperately look for somewhere to park you will drive past business, homes, office, apartment blocks with empty parking space at their building, you just aren\u2019t allowed to park there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The reason this happens is historical. Cities were planned and evolved without the understanding of the technological advancements of the last 20 years. This means that cities planners but parking everywhere to cover all scenarios. Let\u2019s take a theoretical example which will sound familiar to everybody:
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It all makes sense right? Ultimately people need somewhere to park?
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Now let\u2019s say that all these buildings are within 200m of each other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the apartment block, only 70 of the spaces are ever used because a significant number of residents don\u2019t own a car. Of the remaining 70 people, 40 of them use their cars every day from 8 am – 6.30 pm to travel to and from work.
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UNDERUSED SPACE ALERT: <\/strong> The office block has more staff looking to park than spaces available, one day the CEO arrived and had nowhere to park. He gave HR an earful, so they introduced a system where they designated 50 of their spaces to senior management to ensure they all get a space. <\/p>\n\n\n\n There are 50 spaces available on a first come, first serve basis for the rest of the staff. A surplus of roughly 25 staff each day having to park in the shopping centre. The ironic thing is that the senior staff with designated space are super busy and don\u2019t tend to be in the office too often. In fact in keeping with industry average, they are out of the office roughly 25% of the time, meaning that around 12 designated parking spaces are lying idle at any given time but nobody is allowed park in them because they are \u201creserved\u201d. The office only work Monday to Friday 9am until 5.30pm, so all their spaces are empty during the evenings and at the weekend. UNDERUSED SPACE ALERT: \ufeff<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The car park is quite during weekdays, with occupancy regularly dipping under 40% as the mall is quiet with people working. The shopping mall is quite busy during weekday evenings and often reaches 60% capacity. During the weekends it\u2019s often at 80% capacity and coming up to big holidays it hits 100% capacity every weekend. They\u2019ve thought about reducing their parking in the past but tenants were not happy, they need to maximise football in the busy periods especially to ensure profitability. UNDERUSED SPACE ALERT: \ufeff<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Logic has been applied to the size and management of all the car parks but still there seems to be a lot of empty spaces right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now imagine if technology could join the dots in real-time. Imagine if the office could use a system like ParkOffice to forecast the number of staff who need parking and allocate them space accordingly, ensuring they only use the space they need at any given time.
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<\/p>\n\n\n\nSO WHAT’S THE SOLUTION?<\/strong>
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