The important role of car park within an office building, shopping center, hospital or airport is often underestimated. In many cases, the car park provides the first and the last impression for visitors and poor experience can leave them vowing never to return.
Car parks are ‘front door’ of any venue and a well-designed car park that is brightly lit with clear signage and effective traffic flow will always leads to customer satisfaction and repeat business – which translates into business for your tenants and an improved financial yield on your property. Secure Parking believes in maximizing your revenue, while giving comfortable and spacious parking, and reducing your worries. It is for this endeavor that Secure Parking provides a vast range of services that enable the car park to built in the most efficient manner to serve everybody with ease. The consultancy services are supported with state-of-art simulations model like ‘TURN CHECK’ and ‘VISSIM’. These are used worldwide for traffic analysis.
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Traffic Impact & Parking Demand Analysis
The aim of the traffic impact analysis is to understand how the development impacts the adjoining areas and vice a versa in the current and future traffic scenarios. It will assess if the existing roads will be adequate to handle the increased traffic and, if not, what additional measures need be planned, internally or externally.
The traffic impact assessment involves collection of traffic volumetric counts data on the roads in the vicinity (or junctions) to ascertain the current traffic condition of the roads that would impact the site and vice versa. This traffic is further projected into the future years by applying growth factor and adding potential future traffic from (or to) the site (development). Once an understanding of the current and future traffic volumes on the adjoining roads is achieved, various site access strategies are explored based on the Client feedback, architectural intent and potential end users of the property. Each and every user is defined and an access strategy is worked out.
Post finalizing the access points and defining users, lane configurations are worked out to accommodate their smooth conflict-free ingress and egress from the site. Further, project phasing and/or construction phasing is also factored in. If not, it has the ability to severely impact the project in the short-term and long-term as well.
In general, the traffic impact study helps in determining the best entry, exit strategy (ies) to the property, the optimum lane configuration (number of lanes) required for entering and exiting, its ideal geometry, all helps in providing the best experience to the patrons or end-users.
Moreover, it also helps with the ideal placement of the security check & UVSS (under vehicle scanning system) location for cars, motorbikes, service vehicles, radio taxis, buses, etc., based on peak volumes and queuing analysis. Especially, at the entrance, where managing the security checks, boom barriers, visitor holding/parking area, etc all happens at once. Hence, it is preferable to design separate and segregated user wise. All these vital items if not designed well can lead to chaos at the entrance, long queues which spill over on to public streets, leading to delays and increased travel time for the patrons of the development. Hence, accurately predicting and analysing the peak traffic volumes, various peak periods, and their modal mix is key to providing a tailored site-suitable design via the traffic impact study.
Parking Strategy & Design Review
The parking strategy outlines the planning principles, strategic intent and primary issues to be considered when designing the car park. A design review is conducted on the proposed car park plans highlighting operational and functional issues. A proper design will ensure that the car park is safe, easy to use and provides maximum convenience.
Parking is not just about optimizing space utilization in the building. Equally important is the traffic flow in & out of the development which could create bottlenecks, making the destination customer avoids. Consultancy division of Secure Parking approaches any project via following stages and recommends various site-specific traffic & parking solutions.
The vast database acquired while operating car parks across India, helps us to realistically assess any car park, provide best fit solution, root out future operational inefficiencies and increase its effective utilization, in the design and planning stage itself.
A better designed parking not only increases parking revenues but also helps make the development a preferred destination because of ease of access and parking. As part of parking strategy and design review study, an analysis is performed and strategies are finalized for various user groups. User groups divided mainly into members and non-members such as employees, staff, chauffer driven, casual customer, radio taxis, etc., using various modes of transport such as cars, motorcycles, buses, etc. Even service vehicles, water tankers and fire tender vehicles are considered and designed for. A well designed posh aesthetically beautiful campus or building and contrast to that an ugly water tanker or service vehicle standing near a lobby is a height of missed opportunities in terms of design. We ensure that every tiny bit of design requirement, from our operational experience is brought in so as to make the design robust and elegant.
The design process typically starts with understanding the client and the architect’s intent and then proceeding towards sharing our observations on the shared documents (layouts, reports, etc). Further we move towards providing site specific and project intent-driven realistic, operationally workable solutions. Especially when the project goes into operations numerous times design intents changes due to the nature of the site or conditions requiring it. However, due to our global and India specific operational experience, we factor in the (operational) requirements in the design from the very beginning (planning stage). This leads to a robust, realistic, operationally suited, with no post-construction retrofitting needed design. Thus, saving immensely on CAPEX & OPEX due to bad design which the property needs to live with and provide additional manpower needed to deal with design issues.
Overall, the parking strategy and design review is a stage which provides design solutions for an optimized car park with campus-wide user wise circulation. This is provided for any size and kind of development based on Client preferences, architectural design intent and expected operational outcomes.
Parking Management System Design
The task of selecting the appropriate parking equipment and technology is increasingly complex. Automatic pay stations, credit card, internet sales, road system compatible tags, license plate recognition and parking guidance system are all additional factors to consider in the field of access control systems.
Parking is vital component of any development and needs to be addressed with a highly efficient and effectively tailored solution. With increasing vehicle ownership, parking has become a conflicting and confusing situation for many, leading to high retrieval time and long queues. New technology and equipment have made car parks more efficient, user friendly and profitable than ever before. Hence, as part of the exercise of designing car parks, it’s vital to take into account the parking management system and its site specific, user and usage wise technology design. The parking management system includes technology components such as APS, LPR, entry & exit equipment with barrier gates, RFID & Fastags, ticketing system & validators, PGS, digital level displays (DLD), etc.
Secure Parking Solution (SPS) envisions the Parking Management System (PMS) to be smart and automated with a combination of current and future technology such as ultra-high frequency (UHF) tags and readers, automatic number plate recognition (ANPR), Automatic Pay Stations (APS), video graphic Parking Guidance Systems (PGS) and many more.
Access Control system is the core of any parking management system. This stage mainly delas with the access control equipment (hardware & software) with vital components such as access control parameters, payment method. In this stage depending upon the various user categories (casual, monthly parker, visitor, etc.) the access control strategy for each user is designed to suit the development needs carefully.
Post choosing of the best suited access technology and parking management system, identifying the optimum equipment location becomes very crucial to the success of the project. If the equipment is not placed at a strategically well-placed locations, there are chances of queuing which in turn can negatively impact the internal and external driveways of the property. In this stage, with our global & local experience of providing technology solutions and operating car parks in India, we have developed a deep understanding of the providing the right technology and designing well suited placement as part of our design process.
Signage and Way Finding Strategy
The objective of the signage and wayfinding system is to direct visitors from the street level, through the access control system, to vacate bays as quickly as possible in a safe and convenient manner. Further way finding elements will then direct pedestrians to their final destinations and then back to their vehicles and out of the car park.
Signage and wayfinding provide a directional guidance through a carefully designed and planned sequence that guides the visitors to their destination with ease and safety.
Signages in the parking are often confusing and very complex to understand, it may twirl you to a merry go round, resulting in loss of time, fuel etc. Hence it is very important that the signages are designed to be simple and located at all the strategic locations.
With over 40 years’ experience operating car parks Secure Parking has developed its own signage portfolio. This has been developed and tested in the field and has successfully been implemented across our international operations.
Environmental Management
Secure Parking can implement a range of initiatives that will assist a building owner in minimizing the environmental impact of the car park. This is necessary for LEED, GRIHA, IGBC and other green certification.
Financial Feasibility and Revenue Modelling
Revenue modelling involves projecting the capital expenditure, monthly operating costs and revenue to provide an indication of the return on investment and feasibility of a project.
Our vast experience of operating car parks across the world for 40+ years and 12+ years in India provides us the necessary expertise to successfully analyse and predict the financials of any car park. Hence, geared with the experience of providing car parking operations for a plethora of large commercial developments, IT campuses, malls, residential and mixed-use developments, the enormous data available with us can be plugged in to generate a site specific & feasible revenue model.
We have developed a deep understanding of various challenges large-small and mixed-use developments have in India. Therefore, we are best placed to provide site specific revenue modelling. We have a large database of similar developments which helps us in predicting and making realistic estimates of CAPEX & OPEX for any kind and size of development.
Traffic & Parking Analysis Tools - VISSIM Micro-Simulation
With the use of VISSIM modelling, simulation of the movement of individual vehicles travelling within a road network through the accurate replication of driver behaviour is possible. We are able to utilize the software in finding solutions to complex traffic problems. For example, effect of traffic signals, U-turns, entry-exit from service lane, road parking etc. gets highlighted which leads to an efficient traffic circulation option.
This proprietary software VISSIM is used for microscopic traffic simulation to assess current & future traffic scenarios and also the recommended measures & their impact. By analysing key parameters such as travel time, queuing, capacity analysis, overall vehicular and pedestrian flow.
Once the vehicle enters the development it has to be guided to the parking bay which should be easily accessible, without any discomfort to the customer. The design is very critical, else it could lead to long queues and gridlocks, inside and outside the development and make parking bays difficult to access.
The micro-simulation study helps in preparing an optimum design, while avoiding the traffic and parking related ambiguity especially during the early stages of design. The greatest advantage of utilizing micro-simulation is that the design effectiveness can be increased by creating and analysing the different hypothetical scenarios, for visualizing the current and futuristic traffic conditions.
Furthermore, a micro simulation study enables to replicate the traffic circulation inside and outside of the development by testing various scenarios to get the finer details about concerns in the circulation, congestion, conflicts, etc.
Simulating various scenarios empowers the clients in the faster decision-making in choosing the best possible, site suitable traffic circulation strategy (ies) for creating a safe and balanced traffic mobility plan for any development.