The Kingston Centre in Milton Keynes is a British Land owned shopping centre offering renowned brands for food, fashion, electronics, health, beauty, and more. The shopping centre comprises 6 separate car parks catering to various user groups and features over 1,200 parking bays.
The car park is open only for customers and staff of the shopping centre, but recently, people have started misusing the car park. There were issues with people leaving their vehicles in customer parking bays all day.
It led to parking bays being occupied for hours with no proper enforcement service. Also, the ring road near the shopping centre’s car park was the council’s, and it was vital to introduce enforcement initiatives carefully without disrupting any council regulations.
We installed Automatic Number Plate Recognition(ANPR) cameras all over the car park. With the cameras operating 24/7, 365 days, it captures all vehicle registration numbers entering and exiting the car park.
It works towards reducing and preventing parking abuse and gives complete control over the car park’s usage data. The same data helps determine average dwell period and everything to do with usage patterns to make operational decisions.
Our parking attendants were also employed to patrol the car park. Due to the large size of the car park, manual patrol was required to stop and prevent misuse of a particular area of the car park. Manual patrolling also helps monitor areas not covered by ANPR, i.e., ensuring blue badge & parent and child monitoring doesn’t get abused.
Further, manual patrolling ensures parking is regulated in a proper manner, preventing parking over lines, double yellow, and hatched areas. Our parking attendants are well-trained experts who approach and handle conflicts without disrupting any operation of the shopping centre.
We designed and added signage all over the car park with parking criteria such as maximum stay hours. To stop overstaying and people leaving vehicles unattended for hours, we introduced a 4-hour maximum stay duration with a no-return of 2-hour criteria.
With this, cars won’t be left behind in the car park for longer hours. With 6 separate car parks, the maximum stay duration can be adjusted to each user’s requirement. It can be configured based on average dwell time and usage pattern data obtained via an ANPR camera.
With various businesses running in the shopping centre, it was vital to have a system for staff parking too. The staff parking was also the same as customer parking, but the staff vehicles needed to be allocated available space to park. So, the staff vehicles allowed/removed will be done via the shopping centre’s own application.
So, the enforcement solutions introduced by Minster Baywatch helped the Kingston Centre to improve customer parking. The enforcement services are working well for the car park, and parking bays are utilised well.
People misusing the space for customers and staff have been reduced with an enhanced visitor experience.