Is Your Parking Garage Safe?

Customers and employees both need to fail safe in your parking lot or they may be uneager to come to your place of business in the future. Not only that, but if someone is injured in your parking lot space, you could face potential legal liability for not providing a safe and secure environment.

Making sure your parking garage is a safe place should be a high priority and fortunately does not have to be a very difficult thing to do.  You need to identify the risk factors that could exist within the space and then take affirmative steps to correct any hazards and make the space as safe as it can be.

How to Make Sure Your Parking Garage is Safe

To help you make sure that your parking garage space is safe, consider the following tips on safety steps that you should take:

• Use safety mirrors to make driving easier: If you have intersections in the parking garage, turns that it is hard to see, or entrances and exits that provide an obstructed view, the use of safety mirrors is a smart choice. Be sure that you drive through the parking garage carefully several times to identify potential problem areas.  If you notice that you are unable to see in a specific area or that the chances of a collision are increased as a result of compromised visibility, find a top-notch safety mirror that will stand up to weather conditions and correct the dangerous location.
• Provide adequate lighting: In a guide to preventing slips, trips and falls on the University of Oregon website, lighting is described as a very important factor in preventing fall injuries. In your parking garage, you need to make sure that you have all of the interior areas well-lit so that patrons who are walking around after parking their cars or when getting to their vehicles will not be at risk of tripping and falling.  You should also ensure that the stairwells are light up nicely, since the last thing you want is someone to fall down the stairs because they can’t see the stair treads or cannot see a slippery area on the stairway.   You can choose bright, energy efficient lighting so it can be left on whenever patrons are in the garage.
• Add speed bumps. It is not uncommon for people in parking garages to speed through the garage because they are eager to get to their destination and because they know that they aren’t likely to get a ticket while they are inside of the parking garage. You need to do everything you can to encourage people to go at a reasonable slow pace so they can see other cars and obstacles approaching and so they can stop in time before causing an accident. Speed bumps should be added throughout the garage, but especially in areas where pedestrians are likely to walk (and are thus at risk of getting hit) or where traffic is likely to be higher and there are thus more cars that could collide. If there are other dangerous areas in the garage, speed bumps should be added in these locations as well.
• Consider the use of cameras: With cameras, you can record what is going on inside the parking garage and you can thus reduce the risk of people using the garage for criminal activities. Be sure to have many prominent signs that indicate the parking lot is protected by surveillance. Having cameras could boost business as well since those who park in your lots will likely appreciate the deterrent effects of the cameras. No one wants to worry about becoming the victim of a crime when walking to his car, nor about having his car broken into within the parking garage.  Having cameras can deter these illegal behaviors.

These are just some of the key steps that should be taken in order to try to ensure that your parking garage is as safe as it can be.  The best thing to do is to visit the parking garage regularly, to pretend as though you are a customer parking the car, and to identify any problems that exist. Be sure to visit at high-traffic times of the day such as the time when most people nearby are coming to work or coming to a major local event near the garage. When you experience the function of the garage yourself, it will be easier to find problem areas that need to be fixed.