Most parking projects fail at the exit, not the entry. This page shows you how to size lanes, what a complete system includes, what it costs to run — and the six mistakes that turn a car park into a queue on the main road.
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Indicative only. Site conditions change the final design — we confirm on survey.
The headline product is rarely more than half the installed cost. These are the parts that get left out of budgets.
One per lane, entry and exit. Arm length must cover the full lane width plus clearance.
Buried in the road surface. Stops the arm dropping on a car and triggers auto-close.
UHF long-range for residents and staff, ticket or QR for visitors.
Drives the barrier and holds access rules. Size for the full lane count.
Civil work. Must be done before the surface is finished.
Reads number plates. Useful for visitor parking and enforcement without cards.
Shows free spaces per floor. Worth it above roughly 150 bays.
Only needed for paid public parking, not staff or residential.
Without it, a power cut means the barrier is stuck up or down. Neither is acceptable.
The honest trade-offs.
| Consideration | Boom Barrier | Flap Barrier (vehicle) | Bollard | Sliding Gate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Opening speed | 1.5–6 sec | 2–3 sec | 3–6 sec | 10–20 sec |
| Vehicles per hour | ~450 | ~600 | ~300 | ~150 |
| Force resistance | Low — breaks on impact | Low | Highest — anti-ram | Moderate |
| Footprint | Narrow | Narrow | Minimal | Wide |
| Outdoor durability | High | Moderate | High | High |
| Typical use | Office, mall, residential | Premium lobby entry | Embassy, bank, high-security | Perimeter, factory gate |
| Relative cost | Lowest | Higher | Highest | Moderate |
Loop cutting. Detection loops are cut into the road surface and sealed. This must happen before the final asphalt or tile goes down — retrofitting means cutting a finished surface.
Foundation. Barriers bolt to a concrete pad. Soft ground, paver blocks or thin screed will not hold a barrier under daily use, and it will develop a lean within months.
Lane width and arm length. Measure the actual lane, not the drawing. Arm must clear the full width plus margin — a barrier that is 200mm short is useless.
Sight lines. The driver must see the reader without opening the door. Mount height matters more for SUVs and trucks than for cars.
Drainage. Standing water around the barrier base is the fastest route to corrosion in a Bangladeshi monsoon. Confirm the slope drains away from the foundation.
Power circuit. Dedicated circuit per barrier pair. Barriers draw a spike on every cycle; sharing with lighting causes voltage dips.
Mechanical wear is the main cost. A boom barrier arm cycles thousands of times a month. Gearbox and spring servicing every 12–18 months at high traffic is normal and should be budgeted, not treated as a failure.
Loop damage. Road resurfacing, heavy trucks and water ingress all kill detection loops. Budget for one or two loop replacements over five years.
Cards and tags. UHF windscreen tags are consumable — they degrade in sun and are lost with vehicles. In a 500-vehicle site, expect 5–10% annual replacement.
Arm replacement. Someone will drive through a closed barrier. It is not a question of if. Keep two spare arms on site; they are cheap and the alternative is a lane out of service for a week.
The cost nobody budgets: a barrier with no local spare parts. A grey-market unit whose gearbox fails becomes a permanent open gate. That is the real total cost of ownership question here.
Every one has cost a real project real money.
Everyone arrives over two hours and leaves in thirty minutes. An exit with fewer lanes than the entry backs traffic into the building and onto the road.
Do this: Size exit lanes equal to or greater than entry lanes.
Detection loops go into the road. Cutting finished asphalt or tile costs more than the barrier and never looks right.
Do this: Fix barrier positions and cut loops before final surfacing.
Ticket dispensing takes 15–25 seconds per vehicle. For staff who come daily, that is a queue every morning for no benefit.
Do this: UHF long-range tags for regular users. Tickets only for genuine visitors.
A power cut leaves the arm stuck. Up means no security; down means vehicles trapped inside.
Do this: Specify a UPS and decide the fail position deliberately at design stage.
Three cars queuing at a barrier is 15 metres. If your gate is 10 metres from a main road, you are blocking traffic.
Do this: Measure the setback before deciding lane count. More lanes, or move the gate inward.
Measured from a drawing rather than the site. A 3m arm on a 3.5m lane leaves a gap a motorcycle rides straight through.
Do this: Measure on site, add clearance, then specify arm length.
Lanes, not barriers, are what you are really buying. Four questions decide the design.
Peak hour is the number. A car park sized on the daily average queues onto the road every morning.
Your monthly customers end up queueing behind a visitor working out a ticket machine. Separate lanes at the point where volume justifies it.
It cannot rise. This is the most common cause of a parking project being re-quoted after award.
You will be refused, or you will cause a leak. Use radar detection instead — no cutting.
The lane is still blocked. Protect the whole lane or none of it.
A tariff that takes 40 seconds to pay at the exit creates a queue inside the car park, which is worse than one outside it.
Lanes, credentials and detection. Size the lane on the peak hour, never the daily total.
Arm type follows the lane: straight or telescopic for open approaches, folding for basements, fence where people cut through.
Every product above is one DigiMark Solution imports, stocks and warrants. Pricing is quotation-based and depends on quantity and configuration — request a quotation or ask on WhatsApp.
What a parking tender must state to produce comparable quotations.
| Sector | What to specify | Typical scale | The clause bidders exploit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shopping mall | Peak-hour vehicle count; lane split for passes and visitors; payment methods; guidance system if multi-level | 300–2,000 bays | Peak hour, stated. Bidders quote to the daily average and under-size the lanes |
| Hospital | Ambulance priority lane; visitor payment; staff pass lane; 24/7 operation | 100–600 bays | Specify the ambulance lane separately or it gets merged into general entry |
| Corporate / office tower | Tenant passes; visitor handling; integration with building access control | 100–1,000 bays | State whether parking and building access must share one credential |
| Government / defence | Vehicle verification; UVSS or road blocker where required; audit trail | Varies | Under-vehicle scanning is a separate line — do not assume it is in a parking quote |
| Residential / gated community | Resident hands-free entry; visitor handling; guard override | 50–400 bays | Specify hands-free explicitly — it is what residents actually judge the system on |
| Factory / industrial | Truck lanes with wider arms; staff motorcycle control; weighbridge interface if used | Varies | Truck lane width and turning circle decide the arm length, not the car lane |
Divide your peak-hour vehicle count by the throughput of one lane. A barrier with UHF long-range reading handles roughly 450 vehicles per hour; ticket dispensing drops that to around 240. For 800 vehicles daily with 35% arriving in the peak hour, that is 280 vehicles — one entry lane handles it, but you still need matching exit lanes. Use the calculator above.
Because arrival is spread and departure is not. Staff arrive across two hours but leave within thirty minutes of closing. An exit sized for average flow creates a queue that backs up inside the car park and out onto the road. This is the single most common parking design error in Bangladesh.
UHF long-range readers detect a windscreen tag from 3–8 metres, so the barrier opens before the car stops — roughly 4 seconds per vehicle. Ticket systems require the driver to stop, open a window and take a ticket, at 15–25 seconds. For staff and residents, UHF is worth the extra hardware cost within months. Tickets make sense only for genuine visitor parking.
No — and it is not designed to. Boom barrier arms are made to break on impact so that neither the vehicle nor the barrier mechanism is destroyed. If you need genuine forced-entry resistance, you need anti-ram bollards, which are a different product at a very different price. We would rather tell you this before you buy.
Without backup power the arm stays where it was — up, which removes your access control, or down, which traps vehicles. Both are unacceptable, so specify a UPS sized for the lane count and decide the fail-safe behaviour at design stage rather than discovering it during load-shedding.
Yes, with LPR cameras. It works well for visitor parking and enforcement, and removes the cost of issuing tags. Accuracy depends heavily on lighting, camera angle and plate condition, so we normally recommend LPR alongside UHF rather than instead of it — UHF for regular users, LPR for visitors and audit.
Free site survey across Dhaka and Chattogram. Our engineers confirm the design before anything is quoted.