Mall Parking - Circulating Cars Are Not Shoppers, They're Just People Circulating in Cars!

100% parking performance is difficult to achieve. To demonstrate this, picture a row of car parks. Each space 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 for the car park resource can funnel into the mall. But this is parking utopia and not likely top occur. 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, New Zealand. 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 90 minute 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 and so had a 240 minute restriction. Turning over car parks is one of the best ways of increasing through-put of customers per parking space and these two groups of people were lowering the car park turnover and consequently causing a lower number of customers through the mall.

The camera 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 time, come back to do it again. The abuse was incredible. The enforcement numbers climbed dramatically and so did the revenue to the mall owner. However, the phone call volumes to the mall management office climbed as well. This was a major shift away from the parking spaces being self managing to an active management style. The system created free spaces for customers but also generated complaints. In the end, the mall company relented and asked us to slow the enforcement down a little so we created a sort of a balance.

Raise the value of non-shoppers to equal that of the shoppers

Mall owners have said to me that if I raise the 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, that it will somehow hurt the mall's business. The approach is to clear out the car parks of all those who are not adding value to the mall. This is 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 parking spaces are 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 is simple enough to implement, even a poor mans version.

• Divide your car park up into zones.
• Relate those zones to a likely activity in that part of the mall - higher times, lower volumes, mothers, students, all are relatable.
• Restrict low value parkers by using time restrictions, price and enforcement.
• Monitor vacancy times and elasticity of price to tailor it more an more to the higher value user

The distribution of high value customers to the best spaces and restricting lower value customers or non-customers through price, time restriction or parking equipment will turn your site into a high performance mall car park. Customers will be happier, retailers will be happier, the mall company will be happy and those people circulating in cars will become customers .... faster.

Kevin Warwood