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Parking Garage Of The Future
Spunk writes "Like something out of the Jetsons, this NYTimes article [no-reg link] describes a parking garage that automatically stores cars in a 3-dimensional grid, and retrieves them when you return. Europe and Asia have several already."
...the U.S. has had marinas doing this for boats for many years. I'm curious, though, about what happens when the power goes out, like it did in the mid-atlantic states this past week?
When in Japan for work, I found these at lots of buildings. I thought of them as car vending machines - stick a ticket in, get a car out.
They even used a giant motorized lazy susan to turn your car around for you.
What a great country.
1. 2.
Why future?
Several such parking systems are already in use in different countries.
There is one near Lugano (Campione) in Switzerland, and I saw one in Japan.
It is just me, or does this remind you of a gigantic CD changer for cars?
Base ball games. collages. or even you 9-5 job.
7680 MB Disk,192 GB Transfer,
Would be to ban large vehicles from the city. Only allow one or two-person mini-vehicles in, while every SUV has to park on the border and take public transportation. It wouldn't be a politically popular move, but it would be space and fuel efficient.
The 2.5 min per car is based on an average retrieval of a normally packed garage, retrieving cars from far back. I'd guess it would take about an hour to empty the system in this case - probably not more than what it would take for all the cars in a normal garage to emtpy out from similar experiences I've had in Hoboken.
"Honey where are we parked?"
"space 3-16-47...or was that 3-17-46??"
Like something out of the Jetsons, this NYTimes article [no-reg link] describes a parking garage that automatically stores cars in a 3-dimensional grid, and retrieves them when you return.
I don't recall the Jetsons having a 3D lattice parking garage.
Then again, that was a long time ago. And usually I only caught glipses of The Jetsons when there were commerical breaks of Giligan's Isle. I mean, c'mon, what horny young boy is going to waste his afternoon watching The Jetsons when you can yank yourself silly to Ginger and Mary Ann?
Welcome to the fully automated garage. Step awy from your car and rest assured that nothing can go wrong ...
go wrong ...
go wrong ...
The main reason these things are used (in europe) is space.
My dad is an expert on various car park solutions, mainly to let people "store" (park) their car somewhere at the edge of a city to use public transport to get to the centre (so called transferia). And he traveled around the world looking at how other cities/nations did this. He found that in europe solutions focus on using as little space as possible for as much cars as possible, which naturally led to this system. In the states however, the usual solution to this problem was taking a huge slab of land, covering it with some concrete or asphalt, throw a bus/subway/train station in the middle and call it a transferium. The US will get these things when empty land becomes as rare and expensive as it is now in most areas of europe.
Which may never happen because malls (easily accessible by car) fulfill much of the functions for americans that city centres fulfill for europeans, so The US has fewer areas where lots of people need to go that are nearly impossible to get to by car. Maybe when people get fed-up with walking hundreds of metres across a huge car-park to the nearest mall entrance?
In the current system, what happens when 324 people want to get into their cars and try to drive out? I would suspect that the wait would be even longer. You would then be relying upon several hundred people to cooperate. Plus you would have more emmisions with all the cars sitting idle.
What happens when part of the system fails. For example the article mentioned cards that get scanned to identify which car it is storing and which car to retrieve when the driver returns. What if the card failed like some of my credit cards have in the past. Your now stuck in the middle of the city with your car being held hostage by an over grown vending machine. This isn't the only point of failure I see, but is the easies to illistrate.
I grew up in a fairly progressive midwestern city and they tried something similar. They wanted to encourage people to use public transportation to go down to the center of town. That's where the state capital was and also the university (which had a student population of 35K-40K). To "encourage" everyone to take the bus downtown, they severely limited parking and made State Street a no-car street (buses, bikes and cops were the only things that could go down it).
Anyhow, even with these measures, people never learned to ride the bus. They refused to carpool. They continued to drive downtown. Parking was a nightmare. Eventually the city had to cave in and build parking structures down there because things were getting out of hand. Of course, since the downtown had originally been designed to avoid parking structures, adding them in after the fact was difficult, time consuming and expensive. But the voters demanded it.
I don't mean to rag on you Parsec, but I think your ideas of encouraging transportation habits by engineering are naive.
GMD
watch this
...that more SUV driving, republican voting, steak eating, three-putting meatheads won't want to trust their leased pride and joy to some automated parking garage.
There's no precise figures on what the operating costs of one of these would be and how it compares to a traditional garage. Looking at constuction costs alone, there's an additional 3 years to get a ROI with the 22K and 15K quotes for building the automated and ramped garages: If you look at a standard $225 a month charge for both scenarios. If you could prove that the long-term costs are less on these you might convince more people. The thing is though that there is very little ongoing maintenance to do with a ramped garage while you have many more parts to maintain on the automated garages.
The automated garages seem like a good idea. But like some many other things, they are only practicle in America if the economics work out for our benefit. And is that a bad thing?
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
One future, two choices. Oppose them or let them destroy us.
So true. Ancestor post makes obvious point, is overrated.
You give the system a card/ticket. Where your vehicle is parked is of no concern to you. All you have to remember is where the garage is.
The oracle of the Internet (i.e., Google) indicates that Haag used illegal employment methods in Germany and has been involved in setting up front groups for Scientology. Gee, I wonder if the parking is done not by robots at all but by body thetans.
First there is "Like something out of the Jetsons"
then it says "Europe and Asia have several already."
So Europe and Asia are far ahead in time, with cool futuristic things and the US is in the Stone Age still?
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
I found a scooter to be the ideal transport in Madison, but this was back in '88. I think the one think they could have done there to encourage mass transit and walking is beer. Allow beer on the buses, allow beer in hand while walking, and no-one in Madtown, Wisconsin would care about driving around. Except the legislature... no, wait... beer should work for them too...
ceci n'est pas un 'sig'
I think this explains the true origins of the Cube.. It was a prototype for these parking garages!
George Jetson didn't need to park his car (ship/whatever.) It was his briefcase if I remember correctly. Seriuosly though, some parking facilities in Manhattan have something similar. The only real problem is that it is not automated and the operators aren't too fluent in English. I can't recall how long we had to wait to receive our car but it wasn't anything too outrageous. I just remember it because it was something I had never even considered. I really can't see the wait being too much of a problem. What are the odds of 300 people showing up at the exact same time wanting to get their cars? How much different would that be from 300 people arriving at a ramp based garage and all trying to leave at the same time. It would probably be a lot easier actually getting out onto the road then a ramp based garage would.
Not everything is analogous to cars. Car analogies rarely work.
You are correct, Sir. I was indeed talking about Madison, Wisconsin.
watch this
Sad (me) but true...
I hereby inform you that I have NOT been required to provide any decryption keys.
In the debate over public vs private transport, people overlook WHY there is so much traffic in the first place.
Low density suburbs with no commercial or industrial space cannot support mass transit. They barely have the tax base to support basic amenities like roads, police, sewers, water and firestations. It is a no-brainer that a high density neighbourhoods like those found in Manhattan, Tokyo or many European cities can support a lot more amenities per capita than can your typical American suburb. A city block like mine with 20 buildings each with 150 units has the same sewers, water pipes, telephone lines and other infrastructure under the street as any suburb. A look at policing cost will show that the neighbourhood is partly self-policing too.
When I moved into this neighbourhood (the West End of Vancouver, Canada), I quicky found that my car was useless. There is no parking anywhere for more than 2 hours at a time without a permit. Once I got my permit, the car didn't move from that spot for over a month. EVERYTHING is in walking distance. From specialty grocery stores to incredible restaurants to the commercial district for work, to bars, to the beach and forest (one block away), there is no need to drive. The only exception is the mountains for snowboarding, which take 45 mins by public transit or 25 min by car. Not worth the cost of owning a car! Needless to say, after three months, I sold the car and saved over $500 CDN /month, three quarters of the cost of my rent! That was seven years ago. Never looked back.
Part of the reason this neighbourhood developed the way it did is out of necessity. Long ago the city of Vancouver decided that they would never build a freeway. The suburbs built them, but they promptly end at the border of Vancouver. Parking is also limited. This makes driving in Vancouver difficult, to say the least. A city of only 2 million, we also have invested in 2 subway lines and we are building a third. This is not so much to help people get from existing neighbourhoods into downtown, as to to encourge more high density neighbourhoods to cluster around the stations.
In short, increasing population density is the solution to many of the problems facing American cities today. Counter-intuitively, lack of transportation can actually encourage good urban planning. Dense neighbourhoods save the government money , and save the consumer money. It is a win-win situation. Suburbs are simply, unsustainable. Want to fix the transportation problem? Don't build any more transportation infrastructure. Just loosen your zoning laws so developers can build up instead of out, stop subsidizing new developments farther out in the burbs, and let the marker do the rest.
Vista:XPSP2::ME:98SE
I knew I remembered reading about this somewhere back in my mis-spent youth. Turns out that way back in July '76, MAD Magazine's Al Jaffee did a piece on "MAD's Solutions to Big City Parking Problems", which included several variations on this idea.
Concepts such as the "Curbside Multi-Level Parking Elevator Facility" and "Multi-Leveled Lazy Susan High Speed Parking Facility" show that once again, the usual gang of idiots leads the way. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find a scan of the piece, just the cover from that issue.
Vista:XPSP2::ME:98SE
I admit it does look normal next to a Ford Excretion or a Dodge Durigible.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
When the day's activities are over, the driver of the car has to get to the car and get it out of there. The person who rode the cab in can just as easily take the bus out.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a dedicated driver and I can barely get along without a car. But I'm not about to sell buses and cabs short on their strong points, and parking and road congestion are darn good ones in their favor.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Any truck under 10,000 LBS GVW is little.
One future, two choices. Oppose them or let them destroy us.
I lived in an apartment in Japan that used a system like this. One day, after some adverse weather conditions, the power to the building was out.
I'll never forget the pointless small talk i had with 4 Japanese businessmen standing around in front of the parking structure full of working cars and dead car delivery systems, unable to get their cars out and go to work, and trying to remember how the salesmen had convinced them that cars would be more convenient than the train.
After driving a 24' 24000# GVW box truck a number of times for moving, I can say the Suburban is little. :-) I could FIT a Suburban on the back of that thing.
:-)
I like my little Mercury Sable. She's a peppy little 6 cylinder and gets decent gas mileage. But she's no cargo hauler, she's a commuter, which is why I also own a suburban.
If you think the laws are insane that let people who can barely see over the steering wheel drive SUV's, come to Massachusetts, where ANY driver possing a class D license can drive any non-trailer vehicle up to 24000# GVW. Without training. SUV's don't scare me. People like me (no training) getting behind the wheel of 12ton moving trucks scares me.
SUCK CLIFF'S CoCk TACO YOU ARE A NiGgEr.
You Sir are a MORON (plus everyone who moded him up)
like this problem wouldn't exist with any human operating garage.
Once again sir you are a complete MORON.
I am sure they asked the same question when elevator was invented.
So, what does it mean - absolutely nothing, except maybe that you are a HUGE MORON, an outdated HUGE MORON.
Future - because until it happens in AMERICA the fucking idiots wouldn't know it exists.
That's only because you are a moron.
good catch!
You should start running around naked while waiting exactly 2 minutes for a technician to arrive from a near by monitoring station that got the error signal from the that same garage.
That's just the down side of your brains