Shopping centre owners and operators should ask themselves: is my centre safe? and is there more I could be doing to protect customers, tenants and staff?
A retail centre safety review is designed to answer these questions. Rather than focusing on a single element, a safety review looks at the whole centre, including car parks, loading docks, pedestrian paths and access points, to understand where infrastructure and operations can be improved against specific safety objectives.
What a retail centre safety review typically involves
The first step is understanding what you are trying to achieve. This might mean addressing issues that have happened in the past, mitigating risks before they become incidents, or working through compliance checks. These objectives shape the scope of the review, which typically covers:
- Loading dock location, access and operation
- Car park layout and traffic flow, particularly conflict points
- Vehicular and pedestrian access points to the car park and the centre
- Pedestrian pathways
- Overall security
- Compliance checks
When delivery vehicles and customers share the same space
A major safety risk arises when delivery vehicles need to navigate the same areas as customers. Depending on where the loading dock sits, this can’t always be solved through a layout review alone. Where there is no physical way to separate these user groups, the review needs to look at operations instead, asking questions such as:
- How often does each tenancy need deliveries and service vehicle support?
- Is there a particular time the loading dock is busier?
- Can loading dock traffic be limited to certain periods?
At the new Sydney Fish Market, for example, the car park serves both wholesalers and the public. During wholesale market hours, suppliers’ and wholesalers’ small rigid vehicles can access the car park. Outside those hours, the same space becomes a public car park, available to small vehicles only. The way the market operates allows both user groups to share the same area without conflict.
In a retail centre setting, this might look like restricting deliveries to outside of trading hours and limiting service vehicles to access the centre outside customer peak hours.
Designing infrastructure to prevent major incidents
A safety review also considers how infrastructure can help prevent major incidents, such as ram raids, where a vehicle is driven at speed toward a shop or ATM. Bollards are the obvious response, but they’re not the only option. Planter boxes or seating benches designed to withstand impact can protect centre access points and tenancies while integrating with the landscape design, offering a better customer experience than bollards alone. A review of the vehicular access and car park layout can also help reduce the risk of a high speed vehicle reaching the centre.
What happens after the review
A safety review results in a report and design advice, with recommendations prioritised against the client’s objectives. It isn’t a set and forget exercise. As operations change, new tenancies are added and customer habits evolve, new risks can emerge, and these need to be considered in a future safety check.
Talk to ptc. about safety at your centre
If you’re wondering whether your centre is doing everything it can to protect customers and tenants, a safety review is a practical place to start. ptc.‘s engineers can assess your centre’s infrastructure and operations and recommend practical improvements.
Get in touch to talk to us about safety at your centre.