
22.04.2020, 12:45
Maintaining Critical Car Park Infrastructure
Parking solutions provider WPS is undertaking essential maintenance and installation work for customers within key sectors including healthcare and utilities.
Despite government lockdowns in many of the company’s core markets globally in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, CEO, Erik Dijkshoorn, stresses different clients across the world are taking varied approaches to the crisis. “There is a wide diversity of opinion amongst our clients as to how they can best support local priorities”, he says. “It is our job to be as agile and flexible as possible, and I am immensely proud of how our field teams have worked safely and gone above and beyond to ensure our customers’ needs are properly and carefully supported through this genuinely uncharted time.”
In the United Kingdom, the range of car parks that are operational is varied as – despite a general lockdown, some shopping centre car parks remain open to accommodate supermarket shoppers. There are town centre car parks that have opened their barriers while others are keeping their barriers down to discourage people from coming into town, and ensure there are ample spaces available for the people that genuinely need them.
Hospitals, too, are responding to the challenges associated with parking during the pandemic in divese ways, and WPS is working with JustPark which has collaborated with other members of the British Parking Association to launch www.nhs-freeparking.co.uk and help NHS staff and critical care workers find free parking nationwide. Using integration capabilities that were recently recognised with a 2020 Parking Technology Award, JustPark and WPS are working together at WPS customer sites that use ANPR technology.
Simon Jarvis, managing director of WPS in the UK, says: “By collating key worker car number plates and integrating those into the systems of ANPR-equipped car parks, we can provide a system where barriers automatically open to allow key workers to park for free.
“It’s not business as usual. Where our support is needed, and when appropriate planning and safety measures are in place, we are continuing to work with our clients to keep their infrastructure efficiently operational.
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“As well as social distancing and providing PPE equipment, we are cordoning off working areas, and putting up signage as appropriate to inform the public why we are there. For more involved works, we are also providing welfare stations meaning engineers have their own separate washing and toilet facilities.”
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