Unauthorised vehicle access is a huge problem for many businesses that have private parking lots. Once one car realises it can park there with no restrictions, suddenly, more and more feel free to use your space for their needs without actually patronizing your business.
As this impacts your functionality and the experiences of your own customers, not to mention providing additional concerns for staff who need to park to get to work or simply have to spend their days dealing with unauthorized access issues.
If you’re facing this problem and want to stop people from using your parking lot like their own personal driveway, here are a few things other businesses are doing you can try too.
Replacing Permits with Plate-Based Access
A really easy way to get around people using your lot as free of charge is to introduce a barrier system that has automatic plate recognition. And if the plate is logged in the system, then the vehicle is granted access. If not, then they need to be granted that access in the moment, so people can’t just park up and walk away using spaces you need to operate your business.
However, this doesn’t work for all businesses, especially in the retail sector, but you can log details this way to track patterns to identify repeat offenders.
Installing ALPR at Entry and Exit Points
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One of the most direct ways to know which vehicles are on site is to have an alpr camera installed at entry and exit points to read every plate at speed, check it against an approved list, and either grant access, trigger a barrier or flag the vehicle for attention.
All of this is done without any manual intervention, making it a simpler, smoother process than having a guard in a booth checking everything vehicle by vehicle.
Setting Time-Based Access Windows
A supplier who legitimately needs access to the lot at normal working hours doesn’t need that same access during your non-working hours. Time-based restriction here means that approved vehicles can only enter using allocated time periods, and access is restricted outside of this. If you allow entry to everyone at all times, then you’re exposing your business to unnecessary threats, but removing access to parking lots means you’re not letting vehicles enter unless they do so at the time they need to be there.
Using Data to Identify Patterns
It’s not just the arrival of vehicles you need to be looking at. As mentioned in one of the above sections, it’s the frequency of use of the parking lot that matters as well. If you’re logging vehicle movement consistently, you can start to spot patterns that manual monitoring would never catch. These patterns might not always feel suspicious in the moment, until they are.
It might be that a vehicle enters the parking lot, idles in space, but never parks; they simply drive off. Or a plate appears on cameras on multiple sites you own throughout your working week. Structured data access means you isolate this data and turn otherwise isolated incidents into identifiable behaviour.
