Video is becoming more powerful and influentual. One council's clip helped encourage people to park their cars better.

by Andrew Daniels

If you want to change people’s parking habits, would you really think of trying video? Well, it’s worked for us!

You may not know Chorley but here we have a car park right in the centre of town and despite often being busy, people would rather drive round and round than use one of the many other car parks just a short walk away.

Throw in the fact we’ve taken roughly 30 parking spaces for our Christmas attraction and we really are in trouble with people!

To coincide with the arrival of the ice rink this week we’ve opened our staff car park to public use all week (previously it was only open to the public at weekends). This provides an extra 55 spaces just a stone’s throw away from the main car park.

So, how do we explain to people how close it is and encourage people to park there? It was when we were looking at the car park to see what signage was required that we had the lightbulb moment. It’s simple really, film the walk, time it, speed it up and make it into a snappy 30-second video so people can see for themselves.

As with more and more things these days social media is the platform to use and particularly with this topic as town centre parking is never far from being the main topic of debate on the Facebook group Chorley Then and Now, which has 18,000 members.

Throw a bit of sarcasm in our post, attach the video and away it went. We posted at 6.40am on the day the car park opened and by 9am we had more than 9,000 post views (coincidentally Tuesday is when our local weekly paper is out so we’d had more views than they sell newspapers before the shops had opened).

Fast forward 48 hours and we’d had 35,500 post views, 21,200 video views and dozens of comments. More importantly we had plenty of motorists using the car park.

Andrew Daniels is communications and events manager at Chorley Council.

Picture credit: Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru / Flickr.