Whether a small business, marque brand, or potential customer, if you are in a dense urban environment then the challenge of space is a daily battle. You need to balance being easily accessible to your customers while also providing the unique blend of offerings and service that creates long term relationships. Convenience always points to traffic patterns and available parking spaces while getting the feet in the door means nothing if you are not fully stocked. With the supply chain challenges of the last two years, we all have experienced the lack of availability on the shelves, this has highlighted in an even more visceral way the importance of those delivery trucks that often cause so many of us to lose our patience while driving down those tight streets. Few of us in any main street retail or service industry have not heard the complaint from that customer that drove around the block several times due to the volume of delivery trucks blocking all parking and creating a snail crawl of traffic. While the logistics industry has developed several tactics to fight the challenges including smaller more nimble vehicles, this also often means wider periods of delivery or more vehicles at one time. There is little recourse from a store front perspective to deal with these issues. Municipal council meetings and business organizations, while meaningful, offer only limited solutions and have competing priorities that often make parking a low priority. Part of this challenge is a sense that there are no new innovations or solutions to the issues. Parking decks are prohibitively expensive and communities often want them hidden away as an eyesore. Street parking is often limited with no real way of expansion, especially as business districts look to add green and pedestrian space. We have all experienced the vast changes in consumer behavior brought on by technology. Innovations have changed so much of our daily routine yet parking remains one space that technology has rarely been fully engaged. Roker Inc. works with communities of all kinds with vast arrays of issues, stakeholders, and non-negotiables to come up with innovative cost effective solutions to make the balance easier to achieve.
