Data: the key to parking management

What can parking data tell us about the future of office infrastructure and mobility? Collecting and analyzing this data enables us to draw up an action plan based on facts.

Optimizing existing buildings

The shortage of space and the challenge of urban sustainability mean that we need to optimize current construction and better anticipate the capacity of future buildings. It is therefore essential to know how to evaluate the real capacity of available parking spaces. This means analyzing parking occupancy rates.

Let's take the case of office parking lots: if we analyze the occupancy rate of parking lots at the level of each company, it's a very useful piece of data to ensure good day-to-day management of office infrastructures. It enables us to understand the real capacity of the site's infrastructure. It helps to monitor usage and anticipate parking congestion (thanks to the monitoring of reservation data). What's more, if these data are accessible in real time, they ensure that we can react very quickly to any blockages.

When these data are analyzed at city level, the results show that the first solution is to optimize existing buildings, where there is a very large reservoir of unoccupied spaces. Our studies show that by doing away with the system of named spaces and pooling them, they could be used to maximum capacity, multiplying the capacity of the parking lot by up to 2.7 times, thus considerably reducing the number of additional parking lots that would need to be built.

Better understand the mobility currently used by employees and encourage soft mobility

Registering users before they enter the parking lot means associating them with a type of vehicle. Using this data, it is therefore possible to assess the different types of mobility used daily in the parking lot at each site, and set up incentives to encourage the use of sustainable mobility. This information also makes it possible to understand whether the infrastructure needs to be adapted, for example whether it would be useful to remove certain car spaces in favor of bicycle spaces.

Calculate the environmental impact of the building and employee mobility

One of the sources of transport pollution comes directly from traffic jams and cars circling in search of parking space. The challenge here is to make traffic flow more smoothly. One innovation is to digitalize access points, reducing the time spent stopping in front of parking lot barriers. Our analyses show that parking lots with digital access (opening by app or license plate recognition) can handle up to 1.6 times more traffic. Smoother traffic flow and sustainable mobility facilities have a directly calculable impact on the site's carbon footprint, and this is reflected in the ESG ratings of buildings (BREEAM/HQE certifications).

Ensuring return on infrastructure investment

The switch to electric cars has become a necessity, and is now enshrined in law, as in the Mobility Orientation Law (Loi sur l'Orientation des Mobilités - LOM), which requires 1 recharging point for every 20 parking spaces (5%) by 2025. But this law implies considerable investment in charging station infrastructure, which is very costly.

Gathering data on the actual need for electric charging points enables us to pool access to them and ensure that they are used to their maximum capacity, so that we don't have to invest in any that would be unprofitable. Indeed, the installation of charging stations involves not only the cost of the station itself (which can cost up to several thousand euros for fast charge equipment), but also the cost of adapting the parking lot (electrical connections, fire safety systems, etc.).

In our parking lots equipped with electric bollards, it has been calculated that setting up a reservation system and monitoring bollard use can reduce investment costs by up to 50%.

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