Whether you manage parking facilities for a commercial parking operator, university, corporate campus or airport, immediate access to real-time parking availability is a must-have for maximum revenue, productivity and customer satisfaction. Attaining 99+% accuracy levels is not only possible, but the technology can be cost-effective and easy to deploy quickly. For parking professionals looking to reduce congestion, circling and emissions, increase customer satisfaction and employee productivity, optimize utilization, implement demand-based pricing, and maximize revenue, you can deploy cost-effective and easy-to-use technology and provide real-time benefits.  

Bad Accuracy Data Affects Everything 

Your parking operation is adversely affected when you don’t have real-time availability data. Manually counting open spaces in your parking garage or on surface lots is ineffective and produces inaccuracies that have many repercussions. Let’s look at why tracking parking occupancy is important.

Why is real-time occupancy data so important? To answer that question, let’s look at a situation typical of an organization that does not have accurate availability counts.

Let’s say you’re a university with on-street and off-street parking facilities.  You probably have high-volume areas where it’s difficult to find parking. As a result, students and faculty must circle for open spots, which makes them late for class, and in turn, makes them unhappy. The parking situation could even affect their decision to return the following year. All those idling and circling vehicles create greenhouse gas emissions. Word gets out about your parking issues and lack of green parking initiatives, which hurts commuter enrollment. Circling and waiting in line to park cause congestion on streets and in garages and surface lots. That congestion, in turn, creates traffic problems and safety issues for the community.

The Solution 

With real-time parking availability counts you can:

• Push availability information immediately to signage, your parking app and social media to guide parkers to open spaces faster
• Get faculty and students into their seats quickly and efficiently
• Base work or class schedules on parking occupancy patterns and locations
• Implement pricing strategies based on understanding peaks and valleys in parking demand
• Leverage availability data for long-term planning

The good news is you can make simple changes to dramatically improve the accuracy of your parking occupancy data and make parking better for everyone. If you want to learn how to do that, we’d love to talk with you.