As businesses grow and hire more employees, their parking needs can correspondingly rise beyond what was initially sufficient for them. Should this situation occur, you must expand your parking lot and/or garage, so your employees have a reliable place to leave their cars when they arrive each day. We present some ways to increase parking for an office building that you might put into action.
Expand the Parking Area
If possible, you may want to expand your parking area to encompass more land than it did previously. This is the most straightforward answer to a problem of inadequate parking space, and you may be able to carry it out without affecting the existing parking lot. This is because you won’t make many significant changes to it, but you’ll instead construct a wholly new section on nearby land beyond. In some scenarios, there may already be other developed lots around your office that prevent you from creating more spots. When met with this challenge, it is possible to talk with the owners of those adjacent parking areas and negotiate a deal where you lease part of the lots that those organizations or businesses do not need.
Redraw Parking Lines
Expansion is not always a feasible route, though. For an office that cannot actually extend its parking, an alternative may be to redraw parking lines. There may be space that you are not using to its fullest extent with the current partitioning, so changing the lines can improve efficiency in this respect. For instance, you could fit more spots in the same parking area by converting straight lines into angled ones. This allows you to fit more spaces per square foot in your parking lot and narrow down passing lines since they become one-way only. It’s also possible for you to place spots in zones that were initially not set up with lines at all.
Install a Semi-Automatic Parking System
An additional way to increase parking for an office building where you cannot acquire or create more parking space is to install a semi-automatic parking system. This allows you to store cars above the ground, at grade level and below ground, or a combination of all three levels on a given area within a parking garage. The system is made up of several platforms that can shuffle up, down, left, and right so that owners of any car can independently access every one of their vehicles, even when they are in a raised position. They simply identify themselves and wait for the platform with their vehicle to move down to ground level, at which point they can get in and drive away. In this way, you augment your parking garage with spots that could not normally exist if automobiles were confined only to the floor.
To find out more details about semi-automatic parking systems and have one installed in your building, don’t hesitate and call Harding Steel today. Out of all your options, this solution may be the most practical one for your business.