Car Park Lighting Improves Safety

Date: 14/10/22

Car Park Lighting Improves Safety

Think Hire solar site lighting not only makes your site brighter, it can make it much safer too, especially when it comes to site vehicles.

When you think about car or van accidents, you probably think about a shunt at a junction or a pile up on the motorway. Collisions that happen at speed on busy roads. Yet around one in five accidents take place at the lowest of speeds, in the quietest of locations – in the car park.

According to the RAC, over a third of us have experienced at least one car park accident and 31% have experienced more than one. Research by Skoda found that car park accidents cost UK motorists around £1.5bn every year, with 3.74million motorists experiencing significant damage to their vehicles. The same study found that 28% of company car accidents involved low speed manoeuvres in a car park.

Why does this happen?

Part of the problem with car parks and car parking, is that it involves a set of skills that we don’t often use. Your drivers may cover many thousands of miles every year, but very little of this will be manoeuvring in tight spaces and even less will be in reverse. According to the Skoda study, only 53% of drivers think that their parking skills would be good enough to pass a driving test if they took it today.

The other issue is the lack of awareness of the dangers. At low speeds, drivers simply don’t have the same levels of caution as they do out on the road. Combine this with a greater number of vulnerable pedestrians in car parks, and it’s easy to see why these places are such danger zones.

How to reduce the dangers

Car park accidents are a widespread problem in the UK, but they don’t have to be a problem on your site. There are a number of ways to make your car parks safer, including good quality solar site lighting.

• Make sure parking bays are clearly marked and wide enough for all potential visiting vehicles, including vans
• Make sure there is enough space between parking rows for easy entry and exit from spaces
• Make sure pedestrian walkways are clearly marked and designed to take pedestrians off the roadway as quickly and safely as possible
• Make sure car park traffic flows are clearly marked. Creating a one-way system will significantly reduce collision risks
• Make sure your car park is well lit, including parking bays and pedestrian walkways
• Provide lighting for dusk and dawn, as well as overnight, as the light in these conditions can be often be disorientating
• Regularly inspect your car park lighting to ensure that it remains operational and effective

Solar powered site lighting

Solar site lighting from Think Hire is a reliable and affordable solution to car park lighting on site. It works, maintenance free, all year round, providing dependable solar power even in dull winter conditions, and it is highly cost effective to run.

Solar site lighting not only reduces the cost of your energy bills, it also helps to cut your carbon footprint, eliminating CO₂, NOx and other greenhouse gas emissions. And because solar site lighting doesn’t need to be connected to the grid or to your site power supply, it can be positioned wherever it is needed, even at the periphery of your site where vehicles are parked.

To find out more about how solar site lighting can help to make your project’s car parks safer for vehicles and pedestrians alike, talk to the team at Think Hire today. Together we can help cut car park crashes your staff and visitors, and make your cark parks feel brighter, lighter and safer for all users.

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