Anne-Claire, the co founder and manager of Commuty takes a quick look with you at what is smart parking management for companies. So she starts with what classic parking management at companies is and what we see today.
There are two ways of dealing with your parking either your parking spots functions based on dedicated parking spots. This means that every parking spot is dedicated to one specific person and only that person can use the parking spot. This is not efficient because most people do not come 100% of the time to the office so the dedicated parking spots are left empty 30% of the time according to companies. So that’s one way of dealing with your parking organization.
Another way of dealing with your parking organisation that we see at companies is what we call the first come first serve parking management. The word says it the first car to come is the first car to park. And this is very efficient in terms of parking usage but very un-efficient in terms of frustration because you have a lot of people they come too late they don’t have a place to park and they lose time looking for a parking spot.
So dedicated parking spot is un-efficient usage wise and first come first serve are responsible for a lot of frustration in a company.
The optimal way is to have a dynamic parking allocation system. This means that through a system everyday your employees can tell when they come to work and if they need a parking spot. And the system can everyday look at who releases the parking spot and grants access. This way you don’t have to deal empty parking spots on the one hand and the other hand you deal with the demand of frustrated parking users who can demand an parking spot in advance and are no left with just you know “find your own solution because we don’t have a parking spot for yourself”. This is a way to deal with those two issues but also the fact of having a dynamic parking allocation system helps you to have a vie on the usage of your parking spots and on the longer term define what is the optimal number of parking spots you need so everyone gets a parking spot when needed. So this what we call a smart parking management system.
If you want to be even smarter and you want to add a smart and green parking management system to your company this can also be done and this will be a system that when people want to book a parking spot the system is intelligent enough to propose a alternatives be it other ways of commuting or home working or working from a satellite office of the company. So the idea would be to tackle at the same time the parking issue but also the alternative mobility issue together in one system.