Wheel Stops

Wheel stops are the low bars fixed across the head of a parking bay so a vehicle stops where the bay ends. They sit in retail and office car parks, apartment and body-corporate parking, staff parks behind light-industrial units, hospital and school car parks, and in loading areas where a reversing truck needs a definite limit. The people buying them are usually property managers, building owners and site managers dealing with something specific: cars overhanging a footpath, bumpers touching a wall, vehicles creeping into the bay opposite, or a bay next to a glass frontage that keeps taking knocks. Group One New Zealand sets out and installs them across Canterbury, and our vision is to create safer, more efficient parking environments for both drivers and pedestrians across New Zealand.

Parking curbs, not wheel chocks

The term covers three unrelated things, so it is worth being clear. A wheel chock is the wedge you shove under a tyre to stop a parked truck or trailer rolling, and it is loose equipment, not fixed hardware. A mechanical wheel stop is a component inside machinery that limits how far something turns. Neither is what this page is about. There is also a wheel retailer or two trading under similar names, which is why a search for the term throws up tyres and alloys. What we install is the fixed parking curb: a bar anchored to the surface at the head of a bay, sometimes called a parking block or a car stop.

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Getting each stop in the right place

The position matters more than the product. A wheel stop set too far forward lets the front of the car hang over the footpath, which is exactly the problem most sites are trying to solve. Set too far back, drivers with longer vehicles feel the bump before they are properly in the bay and start parking short.

Three things get checked on site:

• Overhang. How far the nose of a car sits past the wheels, measured against whatever is on the other side: a wall, a walkway, a planter, a neighbouring bay.
• The walking route. People cut through car parks. A stop is a trip hazard where a path crosses a bay head, so the stops go in around the pedestrian route, not across it.
• Falls and drainage. A stop laid across the fall dams water behind it. On a surface that already ponds, the position shifts or the stop gets a gap in the run.

Set out, supplied, fixed down

Design happens on your car park. We’ll come out and take a look at the site and discuss ideas with you about the best solution for your situation, then mark up where each stop lands against the bay layout, the walkways and the drainage.

The stops themselves are then supplied to that schedule, or fabricated in the workshop when the site needs a length or a profile that does not come as stock.

Installation is drilling and anchoring. The fixing is the part that decides whether the job lasts: asphalt, new concrete, old concrete and sealed chip all take a different anchor, and an anchor chosen for the wrong surface is the reason loose wheel stops are the most common callback in the trade. Where the surface is being resealed or the bays remarked, the stops come up and go back down afterwards rather than being marked around.

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Get a bay layout looked at

One thing worth settling before we come out: on a leased site, who actually signs off the change. Wheel stops become part of the building’s parking layout, so the decision often sits with the landlord or the body corporate rather than the tenant asking for them, and a stop fixed into somebody else’s slab without that conversation gets removed at somebody’s cost. A quick check of who owns the surface saves that entirely.

Phone us on 027 424 0600 or email info@groupone.co.nz, 7am to 3pm Monday to Friday. Group One New Zealand, Unit 1, 37 Foremans Road, Islington, Christchurch 8042. NZBN 9429053752833.

Call 027 424 0600 to Request a Free Quote