There was a time that multi storey car parks captured the British zeitgeist – a symbol of development and booming industry, they represented all that was good about Blighty. That time has gone.

Historically, multi-storey car parks have not been renowned as architectural feats. However, the familiar grey concrete boxes are to become a less familiar sight if Adam Bidder, managing director of Q-Park, is to be believed. “In general, car parks haven’t got the recognition they deserve, although sometimes they’re just big concrete blocks and obviously they’re not particularly nice.” But there are an increasing number of exceptions, he adds. “Look at our site on Charles Street, Sheffield, which has just won an award from the Royal Institute of British Architects. I think that backs up the fact that car parks can now form part of the architecture of a city and become a landmark building.”

Q-Park is currently working with a number of shopping centre partners to build new on-site car parks and to renovate existing ones. The Netherlands-headquartered company is now one on the top three car park companies in Europe, with a turnover of €600m and oversees 850,000 car parking spaces across 6,000 parking facilities. The basic premise of the company, as reflected in its name, is quality in parking. As a result, the company refuses to take over facilities which do not meet its tough standards of quality. For example, particularly low roofs and subsequent poor circulation can be a deal-breaker when it comes to renovation projects. “We generally would want a minimum roof height of 2.5m; if car park ceilings are particularly low then we would walk away from
those deals.”

As a result of the branding, house style and impeccably high standards, customers too have begun to associate Q-Park car parks with quality, says Bidder. “We have a Q-Park house style therefore customers recognise and feel comfortable with the brand straight away,” he reports.

CUSTOMER SERVICE

A good or bad experience in a shopping centre’s car park could be the difference between a repeat visit or losing that customer to a neighbouring centre or high street. “The car park is the first and the last thing the customer sees,” explains Don Nugent, centre manager at Dublin’s Dundrum Town Centre. Over two thirds of visitors to Dundrum arrive by car, which was an added incentive to get car parking arrangements right when the centre opened in 2005. “Last year we had 30 per cent more cars than Dublin airport: they have 30,000 spaces,” he reports. “Obviously the dwell time is different but we have a lot of traffic movement. In a typical week in May we’d see in excess of 85,000 cars.”

Anticipation of such high traffic figures led to Nugent and his team plumping for a unique combination of systems. “They were designed to get the cars off the road as quickly as possible and then to get them parked in an efficient and timely manner,” Nugent reveals. The car park also features an automatic number plate recognition system in order to help people find their cars, as well as a number of electronic help points. In addition, an antennae system was put in place to ensure customers wouldn’t lose their mobile phone signal as 90 per cent of the car park is underground. “The reality is that nobody realises we have that system in place, but we want to ensure customers left here with a pleasant experience; we didn’t want them getting frustrated that they lost their phone call half way through.”

Appearances aside, ensuring a high level of customer service, even throughout the car parks, is crucial to leaving the customer with a positive memory of a shopping centre. Liverpool One has both. “In terms of the development of Liverpool One, Grosvenor have really pushed the boundaries and have been very innovative in terms of the design of the car park,” reports Bidder. As well as being commended for its outstanding architecture in the ‘best new car park category’, the British Parking Association has awarded Liverpool One’s car parks with the title for exceptional customer service.

OPEN ALL HOURS

Car parks at mixed-use schemes, including Liverpool One and Dundrum, typically have longer opening hours to accommodate the slew of bars, restaurants and cinemas that operate outside of normal centre opening hours. This in itself brings additional security challenges, says Bidder. “Our aim with mixed-use schemes, generally, is to have the car parks open 24/7,” he explains. “In terms of driving into the car park, it will probably just be open during the day, in the evening we have roller shutter doors which just come up and down to let cars in or out. We also have door nodes, so the only people who can get into the car park are those with a ticket. That gives us a virtually zero crime rate,” he claims.

While Q-Park is fastidious about quality and design, credit-crunch hit landlords and shopping centre owners may not be quite so keen to pour investment into a cutting-edge, architecturally-brilliant car park. While Bidden and his contemporaries are inevitably aware of the growing pressure to consider cost-effectiveness first and foremost, he hopes shopping centre owners will look not be short sighted. “I see the risk in the current climate as being the fact that people might be tempted to make a short term decision for what’s essentially a long term project,” he says. “When you build a car park, it’s there for 50 or even 100 years and therefore it’s extremely important that it’s done for the long term because that’s how we’ll maximise earnings for the shopping centre itself.”

For the price-conscious, there are also certain aspects of the project which can postponed until further in the process, continues Bidder. “Obviously the better quality you can make it the better, but there are things you can do to minimise the cost or you can do at a later stage. In terms of refurbishment, for example, the floor coatings are quite expensive, so you could do that subsequently if you wanted to.” However, building the overall shell or structure of the car park to a high standard is absolutely critical, continues Bidder. “If there was a short-term need to save on cost, I think you’d be better off building that overall architecture of the shopping centre car park as an investment for the long term, but maybe take a view to do other improvements at a later date.”

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