Since most people across the country drive automobiles to get from one place to the next, any sizeable building needs its own parking area. Otherwise, it will quickly become a troublesome and time-consuming affair to visit that building. For hospitals, having efficient parking is even more vital than it is for general commercial establishments because people come to have their medical needs diagnosed and treated. Some cases may be urgent, so inadequate or poorly organized parking could contribute to tangible harm for those patients who need immediate attention. People who are injured or sick and those who drive them may have a difficult time making their way to the hospital and back when they must park far from the building. Seeing how critical parking is to medical institutions, you should find strategies for how to plan better hospital parking. Below, we present several viable methods that you can employ.
Direct Visitors With Visible Signs
As you know, the hospital grounds can be tough to navigate because of their vast size and many sections. Multiple buildings and campuses may also come together to form one hospital, further complicating matters for individuals who are unacquainted with the layout. Think from the perspective of the average visitor and place signs along the entryways, exits, and splits in the road so that anyone can figure out which way to go without too much trouble. You may use arrows to point left, right, or straight and words to indicate what type of parking they will find.
The signs should also be large and clearly legible as drivers approach them. Design them to stand out from their surroundings so that people do not miss them. You can use bright blues, reds, and greens in combination with white in the signs’ overall coloration and lettering to accomplish this. For those who arrive at night, you might build in backlighting to the signs to keep them visible in the darkness. An important point to remember is that all the signs you create should adhere to a consistent format. This way, visitors can easily identify them as being part of the hospital.
Account for Various Needs
Numerous people with different needs and jobs must come into a hospital every day. To have them all crowd through one entrance would lead to confusion and slow everyone down. You should instead aim to include numerous points of access for each type of visitor to your building. The parking area should have a place for stopping briefly right near the front where people can drop off and pick up patients. Along with this, you should set apart a separate drop-off zone for emergency ambulances only. This will ensure that the ambulance personnel can swiftly transport people in critical conditions inside without any obstructions.
Your parking should also account for delivery trucks that come to restock medical supplies and food. The loading docks and the zone they use for drop-off should be situated apart from the main parking lot and garage, removing the potential for those large trucks to jam up access to the building. Conventionally, the delivery area and the emergency area are usually located on opposite ends of the premises. As for regular visitors, you can have parking spaces marked out farther from the hospital so that they can easily walk to the building.
Manage Employee Parking Needs
Employees of the hospital also need a place to park, but you don’t want them to take up too much room that visitors need to use. Hence, a point for how to plan better hospital parking that you must consider is the management of employee parking. Rather than leaving parking lots and garages as free-for-all areas, you could implement assigned parking. With this kind of system in place, employees will have their own designated spots along with corresponding permits indicating where they are supposed to leave their vehicles. By reserving certain spaces for the hospital workers, you guarantee that the rest of the parking area is open for visitors to use consistently.
If your parking is limited enough that you cannot save enough spots for all employees, you may need to offer a shuttle service for them. You can then expand parking farther from the hospital and offer shuttle buses to transport staff from their cars to the building. Shuttles are capable of acting as a permanent solution, but they can also serve as stand-ins while you further develop and restructure the parts of the property that are closer to the hospital to accommodate more people.
Use Mechanical and Puzzle Parking Systems
When you want to add more hospital parking space without forcing people to walk farther or ride a shuttle, you can utilize mechanical parking lifts, semi-automated systems, or fully automated systems. A mechanical parking lift raises a vehicle on a platform so that a second car can park on the ground beneath it. The advantage of this setup is that you can put in parking spaces above the floor within a parking garage, doubling the number of vehicles that can park there. While the automobiles that are on top cannot drive away without the bottom vehicles moving out first, you can successfully use parking lifts in tandem with valet services to eliminate any inconvenience this might cause for visitors.
Semi-automated systems are those where users must drive into parking spots themselves. Once their vehicles are in place, the systems can elevate and rearrange them with moving platforms. Because of the way the platforms can move, some people refer to semi-automated systems as puzzle parking systems.
In the same vein of parking lifts, puzzle parking systems make use of vertical space in a parking garage that cars could not park in before. However, the platforms can move both up and down and side to side so that the system can shuffle them and bring down any car held within it without the need to remove the others.
Automated systems are the most involved to build. They have inner racks and spaces below or above ground into which they place cars. People only need to place their cars in the entry to the automated parking structure; the system takes care of parking the vehicles inside itself. Automated systems maximize parking efficiency because they can store automobiles tightly by moving them into spaces with a platform that moves in all directions. There is no need for pedestrian walkways or room for drivers to maneuver.
