Your parking lot can leave your household members or company employees vulnerable to thefts and break-ins, and the fact that most people spend less than 10 minutes in the parking lots even make such areas exposed to security lapses. There are some parking lot security elements you must not leave out in order to enhance the security of such sensitive areas.
Increase the lighting coverage
Make sure everywhere in the parking lot is well light up. Those dark shadows in and around your parking lot will not only reduce visibility for car owners or other users, but it will also give a hiding place for criminals. If your parking lot is such that people have to use headlights or smartphone lights to navigate the area, then the level of darkness is causing great discomfort. Make sure you add lumens and other bright options to cover wider areas. You can also make use of uncluttered layouts and great outside views and transparent interior walls to make the parking lot more secured.
Make use of bright paints
Dark colors have been more popular in the past for parking lots, but the addition of a coat of bright paint on your walls and columns will ensure that light is reflected and such lighting option can even give your interior some facelift. It is ideal to make use of reflective paints or addition of stains on floors and ceilings because those glossy surfaces are efficient in bouncing light off efficiently- dull colors of concrete found in many parking lots are not suitable.
Enhance your surveillance options
Entrances and narrow places within or close to your parking lot deserve more surveillance. Places such as corridors and stairwells must have more surveillance options. Better surveillance simply means more crime-in-progress situations can be easily exposed Assaults, slip and fall accidents can be caught on surveillance camera. Better surveillance also means any car accident that occurs can be captured. The surveillance cameras always give the best clue when investigating crimes that happen in the parking lot. Aside from extra security, the presence of wider surveillance cameras can ward off criminals. The 360-degree Pan-tilt-zoom surveillance is one of the best options for parking lots.
Schedule frequent patrols on your parking lot
The human element of surveillance at parking lots cannot be overruled. Make sure you schedule parking lot patrol at intervals in order to ensure that you don’t leave enough room for criminal activities in the parking lot. Having different parking lot staffs patrolling your parking lot will provide some level of comfort. It is important that you schedule most patrols in the evening. In addition to regular patrols, you may want to consider having some patrol staffs to escort visitors to your parking lot.
Improve the access control features
There are two goals that access controls can attend to when installing in parking lots, first it ensures a safe and reliable flow of vehicular traffic and secondly, it keeps records of individuals who use the parking lot. Having parking lot users to user credentials such as IDs, smart cards, issued passes, and sticker tags, can serve as pre-approval for the use of parking lots, and will equally reduce crimes in such areas. A parking gate system with the use of access control features can be paired with other barriers such as gates and landscape bumps to further control traffic and restrict access while reducing the speed on users.
Make use of landscaping barriers
Landscaping barriers such as road bumps, fences and Bollards may seem to provide little-added security in your parking lots, they can however assist is slowing down fast-speeding vehicles; hence it can slow down a criminal trying to escape. Fences can direct parking lot users on where to enter and where to exit, and when you add gates to these components, you can further streamline or restrict the flow of traffic within the parking lots. The addition of clearly marked spots for parking alongside the use of crosswalks and lanes will reduce accidents and make pedestrians much safer.
Call for help signage
You wouldn’t believe how many people you can save from hijackers when you provide an instant call for help sign at strategic places in the parking lot. Installing intercoms for emergency medical and security problems will give the parking lot users some sense of safety because they can easily call for help.
Get a premise liability insurance
It is believed that more than 18% of auto accidents occur in commercial parking lots. Property owners are usually held liable for most parking lot accidents, and the only way to escape the financial implication is to get premise liability insurance. All defects in and around a property’s parking lot must be removed in order to avoid being liable for accidents.
Install automatic lockdown
In case of severe crisis, one of the best possible ways of managing commotion and stop all vehicle movements is to install automatic lockdown to stop vehicular movements while allowing people to walk through emergency exit points. Automatic lockdown may include underground cylinder brings that shoot up to stop vehicular movements in emergency situations.
Make regular maintenance of your parking lot a priority
All dysfunctional security features can make criminals get away with attacks in parking lots, therefore, all security features, especially electrical security components must be repaired and confirmed to be functional at all times. The poorly-lit parking lot can make it easier for crimes to be perpetrated by when everything is in order, crime perpetration becomes extremely difficult.
Conclusion
Creating an aura of safety in your parking lots must include a systematic and regular upgrade of your security features. Criminals are becoming smarter these days and you need to get smarter by upgrading your security devices in order to prevent criminals from wreaking havoc on innocent people within your parking lot. You may want to contact a professional locksmith nearby for fortified locks and new gating systems. Professional locksmith technicians can also provide a much more efficient access control system. It pays to have a set budget for upgrading security features in the parking lot.
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