From the outside, you’d never think that people care much about parking. That is, until you manage a building attached to even a small number parking spots. Whether you control the whole parking area or a few spaces in a shared garage, people care passionately about parking position. And keeping everyone supplied with a spot and happily following the rules is fraught with surprising challenges.
Guests parking in reserved spots, parking spot ‘theft’, and confusion about assigned spots are among a constant concern. In larger facilities, you may also have trouble with people getting lost looking for their assigned spot or mis-assigning residents too far from their entrance. Fortunately, you don’t have to handle all of these issues with facility maps and diplomacy alone. Mobile technology has introduced valuable new solutions to parking management.
With a parking management app, your resident and employee parking concerns will start solving themselves. There are three primary ways that a parking management app like can make your life as a building manager much easier.
Saves You Time
With a parking manager, you will be able to dynamically assign, reserve, and enforce parking for each authorized vehicle. Whether you have five slots or five hundred, the app will keep track of who is supposed to park where. Even down to the precise time, allowing you to assign parking in timed shifts.
A parking app also allows people to independently reserve parking spaces without interacting with you or a staff member. Simply working through the app can save you many hours of taking requests, data entry, and checking on assigned spaces. Your residents and guests alike will be able to make reservations, check assignments, and even route directly to their spot without asking for directions.
Finally, the parking app isn’t just a data tracking and assignment interface. It can also function as a gate or garage door opener for your residents and registered guests. This can save you and the drivers even more time not having to call in any time someone doesn’t have an opener. Whether that is because they switched cars, are visiting, or their opener is broken.
Simplifies Enforcement
A parking app that tracks every single spot assignment can also simplify the process of enforcement. The app will keep track of the license plates, makes, and models of each registered-assigned vehicle so that enforcement staff will know when someone is in their correct spot, missing, or in the wrong spot.
The app can show you if someone who is currently registered is in someone else’s spot. And if someone calls in complaining that their spot has been stolen, you can easily look at the spot and check the assignment vs the situation. There are also ways to re-confirm an assignment if a resident driver has an unusual car for a few days.
They can re-book their spot through the app and update their vehicle, or you can check their name and license. This will make life much easier for parking enforcement staff because any conflicts can be cleared up either by checking or updating the app that tracks all parking assignments.
Prevents Conflicts
Of course, the beauty of a parking app that faces both the manager and drivers is that the app can prevent conflicts from happening in the first place. First, the app will make it much easier for people to find their assigned parking spot. This means fewer people will be inclined to just park anywhere (aka: in someone else’s spot) when they get desperate.
Second, the app will clearly know the difference between one spot and another. There should be no conflict between the depiction of spots in the app and actual spots in the real world. This will make it much easier for two people in a mild parking dispute to determine which spot belongs to which person.
Finally, the app is constantly updating and providing the most current parking assignment to all users. Not only is this useful for enforcement, it also allows people to double-check their parking assignment and even update their own assignment/reservation. Guests can confirm their parking reservation and find the correct spot in a timely fashion. Residents can update their parked vehicle if it changes. And anyone with a recently updated assignment can find their new spot.
Put simply, the app removes most of the causes of parking conflict: confusion about assignment, lack of assignment, and getting lost.
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The best part is that using a parking manager app can easily work with whatever solutions you are already using. Paper tickets, manual gate openers, rented parking spots, and more. For further information on how a parking manager app like ParqEx can make your life easier, contact us today!
