In this video Anne-Claire, the co-founder and manager of Commuty talks to you about “what to do when you have a parking that’s used based on the “first come first serve” principle” and that you have unhappy employees.
So, basically, how do that work? A very concrete example: a company with 100 employees and 50 parking spots in the building. “First come first serve” means that the 50 first employees driving to work enter the building and park. And as for the 51st, he drives into the parking, he looks for a free parking spot, he doesn’t find a parking spot. He has to get out of the parking and find a parking spot, either on street or in a parking building, pay for the parking or change his blue disc every two hours. Basically, as you imagine, the 30 people who are driving to work and don’t park inside the building are unhappy and complain to the facility manager everyday. What is the choice of the facility manager here? What do we see at our clients the most?
They tend to rent extra parking spots outside the building.
So let’s say, here there are 80 employees driving to work everyday. The solution would be to rent 30 extra parking spots in a parking building outside. So, this is an option but this is very expensive and also, most probably, the 80 parking spots will not be used 100% of the time.
So, what can a facility manager do to find an optimal point between more parking spots and optimal usage? What we would recommend is to look at those 80 people driving to work: are these people unable to use another mean of transportation to come to work? Is is relevant? Is there another way to commute that could be a facilitated offer to these people? The idea is to look at that and see if we can actually park less cars everyday. That’s one thing. And then, once we know how many cars really have to come everyday to work, this will the optimal number of parking spots. Let’s say it’s 65, the facility manager will only have to rent an extra 15 parking spots outside the building instead of 30 parking spots.
So basically, the idea is to look at parking management in a double way. It’s a combination of mobility management to minimize the number of cars that have to be parked and an optimization of the existing parking spots to not pay for unused parking spots.