How can you avoid hearing this from a customer or through the grapevine? While proximity to destination and cost are the major determiners of where individuals park, other characteristics may play a large role in why people do or don’t want to park in your garage. When is the last time that you – not your staff and not your operator – walked through your garage to see how it looks, how it works, and how it feels in terms of security, attractiveness, and ease of movement?
How well are you following your own or industry standards for cleaning the floor, walls, glass areas, stairwells and public areas? Are all of your signs in place and do they still provide accurate and up-to-date information? Are you maintaining drains, floor markings, security exits, and doors? How difficult is it for parking patrons to find elevators and stairs, and can they tell where they are when they arrive at street level? Are the lights too bright, too dark, wrong color, in the wrong places? How are parking patrons finding empty spaces?
Your garage may have had appropriate hours of operation when it began, but if the land uses have changed over time, are the hours still appropriate? Do you provide any wayfinding to destinations close to the garage, particularly if there are elevators and/or stairs in several locations? Are security measures obvious to customers, or explained in quick and easy to understand ways?
While you may have had nothing to do with deciding the garage design, you can have a huge effect on its attractiveness using paint, light, murals, etc. Have you made the garage interesting and attractive, and provided some help with driver orientation while doing that?
Related to the larger picture of parking as an industry, is your garage effectively promoting the essential role of parking in public and private locations? Are you helping to illustrate why adequate and well managed parking is important to the community and to the destinations it serves? Are you providing your customers a positive and helpful experience? Or is the impression of your garage contributing to the negative ideas of parking as dark, unsafe, unsavory, and located in ugly buildings?
What are your priorities for improving your garage(s)? How did you develop them? When is the last time you asked your customers to give you input on the improvements they would like to see in the garage in which they park? Have you examined the costs to make those improvements in order to determine what you can do and when you can do it?
What are you going to do better in 2022?
Tuesday, May 17
