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Parking Garage Of The Future

Posted by timothy on from the ferris-bueller-would-be-pleased dept.

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."

9 of 111 comments (clear)

  1. Japan has used them for years... by orn · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

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    1. 2.
  2. Re:Not much new here... by Mattcelt · · Score: 2, Interesting

    And boy, I wonder how they handle rush hour with a system like this... What if all 324 people want to get out at the same time?

    324 cars
    *2.5 mins/car

    /2 elevators
    =405 minutes or 6.75 hours to get them all!

  3. Re:another solution by Parsec · · Score: 2, Interesting

    One way to ban large vehicles, would be to only fund / build parking for mini-vehicles. Sure you could drive around in your SUV, but there's nowhere to park the thing.

  4. Re:Not much new here... by fm6 · · Score: 2, Interesting
    ...what happens when the power goes out, like it did in the mid-atlantic states this past week?
    You're screwed, of course. Just like the people who couldn't get their cars out of our company garage during the last blackout. Supposedly there was a way to operate the security curtains without power, but the guy who knew how to do it was off that week. Being dangerously dependent on technology that goes away with the first infrastructure glitch is nothing new.

    I seem to recall seeing one of these in a 50s crime movie. Not that Jetsony. Now if the cars were held up by magnetic levitation. Oops, there's that power issue again...

  5. Why they're used. by Chilles · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

    1. Re:Why they're used. by Henry+V+.009 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Kunstler is always a good authority on this kind of thing (he believes that American cities are wretched wastelands devoted to the worship of the automobile). Here is an article in which he compares how Europeans walk a lot more than Americans because they have the kind of cities that make walking possible (and enjoyable). Big and Blue in the USA

      Here is his website: http://www.kunstler.com/index.html His "Clusterfuck Nation" ongoing commentary is worthy of a bookmark, even from a right-winger like me.

  6. That won't work -- I've seen what happens by GuyMannDude · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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

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    watch this
  7. Re:another solution by jonm · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Why don't you all take one bus instead?

    Was that so hard?

  8. Cabs are different from personal cars... by Tau+Zero · · Score: 2, Interesting
    in that they take up far less parking space per ride. Even if the cab is only carrying one rider at a time, it is carrying far more riders on an average day and it still takes only one space at the taxi stand.

    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.

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    Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.