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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 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?