There are hundreds of millions of parking spaces across the United States. Around one-third of them are thought to be in asphalt parking lots.
In a 2012 study titled “Rethinking a Lot,” MIT Professor of Urban Planning Eran Ben-Joseph wrote that “in some U.S. cities, parking lots cover more than a third of the land area, becoming the single most salient landscape feature of our built environment.”
With that in mind, it’s easy to see why parking lot maintenance has become such big business. Parking lots represent a critical form of infrastructure, and they don’t look after themselves.
Parking lots don’t have many moving parts, but they are still exposed to rough treatment from vehicles and the weather as the days go by.
Damage to the surface can render a lot dangerous and, well, ugly. Regular maintenance, ranging from repairs to specialized treatments, can help preserve a parking lot’s value and ensure its users are kept safe.
For parking lot and facilities managers, there are a number of tasks that come together from an overall maintenance strategy. At a basic level that means sweeping, cleaning, and removing debris to reveal areas that need special attention, as well as repainting lines that have faded over time.
When damage is discovered, cracks need to be filled to protect the top surface layer; asphalt needs to be sealed every couple of years to prevent weathering, and, in the worst-case scenario, lots need to be partially or entirely repaved if the ground begins to crumble.
Below are a series of checks for parking lot managers to run through during an inspection.
The first set serves as a parking lot safety inspection checklist to ensure the entrance to the parking lot is in a safe and working condition:
The second set ensures markings and signs are correct and visible:
The third part of the checklist ensures the lot’s surface is in good condition:
The final part of the checklist concerns security, keeping customers safe and reducing risk:
The checklist above is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to inspecting a parking lot. And the task is even greater as the scale increases, in a lot with thousands of spaces and hundreds of square feet to be checked.
It’s when the scale is ramped up that drone technology is particularly effective. With a drone, property managers can identify anything that’s out of the ordinary, from vegetation growing where it shouldn’t to cracks developing on the parking lot’s surface. You can even quickly and safely perform a commercial HVAC inspection, utilizing drones from the ground-level of a property to its highest points.
With high-quality images and smart software able to analyze that data in minutes, maintenance teams can be alerted to issues and act on them quickly. And, because drones can cover ground far faster compared to manual inspections, the whole process takes place in a fraction of the time.
For more information on how you can tap into the DroneBase Pilot Network to simplify your property maintenance tasks, check out our property management page.