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Inside a Mechanical Parking Garage
poisedleft writes "Slate has this article about a mechanical parking garage in DC. 'Despite the undeniable Jetsons cachet of the robo-garage, the Summit Grand Parc went automatic only because it had to. A 60-foot-by-106-foot lot behind the building, the only land available for a conventional garage, couldn't hold more than 14 spaces.' One potential problem for suffering city dwellers: long lines at rush hour."
If I'd want to be inside a mechanical parking garage. That sounds danagerous. You could be managled, or trapped, or something.
Is your name Daryl?
and the selector button? it's stupid, stupid to build a vending machine for cars and hide them. especially when I have quarters.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Cars not picked up in time to avoid having racked up more charges for being parked than they're worth are automatically loaded into the attached crusher...
This sort of technology has been widely used in Japan since the early 90s.
It sure has been a long while...but IIRC when George Jetson arrived at work after dropping off Jane, Elroy and Astro his vehicle collapsed into a standard size briefcase which he took into the office.
$cat
Of course, if everyone just used public transit, then public transit would be faster and we could put parks in place of parking lots. But I guess it is more convenient to sit twice as long in a grid lock...
These things are all over Japan... even in the relatively small towns...
What are we, backward bumpkins here?
Your car is much harder to steal. Two layers of security, not just one - but it is a cool hacking challenge. Any takers?
webpage
This sounds like something they would have at Disneyland. With the extra space they would have they could build a third theme park.
http://www.savesamandmax.com
This sounds great for dog owners. Not only can you park and leave your dog in the shady underground, no animal rights people will be able to get to your windshield to leave a flier explaining what a bastard you are.
Available here.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Having some guy with a crappy car dripping oil down on your convertable.
What if a laser breaks? See paragraph A of this post.....
I still want one tho... just cause my neighbors would be jealous.
That really is my homepage, no kidding.
These things are as common as mud in cities like Taipei and Tokyo. Pretty damn slow too.
If the power went out you'd be screwed.
Moo!
You be the judge...
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
DC Press release
Space saver company
Nope... it appears the company really exists.
Slate would have had to have gone a long way to fake a website this detailed and then not link to it in the story.
There isn't really anything in the article about how it works or any pictures, like here.
It doesn't look like it's very accessible - if you forget your phone or a book or whatever, I wonder if can you walk down underground and get it instead of waiting for the car to come back up. Looks like you'd just get sliced by the machinery. I thought there might be a pathway around the outer walls so you could still get to your car.
How about something like ZipCar, with hourly-rental cars distributed throughout the city/county/interstate, near mass-transit junctions? These automated dispensers would be replenished with a just-in-time supply chain. Now economies of fleet scale, including propane/CNG/electric power, can be available to the aggregated community, amortizing the capital costs across the maximum use.
Every new building in crowded centers should build 150% of their parking capacity requirement into their architecture, and get all parked cars off our congested streets. When the spaces are filled with fuelcell vehicles, the building can autonegotiate with the vehicle owners for competitive power pricing in either direction across their charge plugs. All this possibility makes the Jetsons look like some 1960s cartoon.
--
make install -not war
Hoboken, NJ has one as well, it took forever to build and I don't hear anyone talking about it, but it's still a cool concept. Only dropped cars a couple of times too. (much less than 0.01% error given how often it pushes n pulls cars...)
[o]_O
Moron. Just because America is "not lacking in parking spaces" doesn't mean an auto-carpark isn't a massive improvement over the traditional, enormously wasteful (of space and money) parking lot. Sprawl and pollution, for starters, would be significantly less than the major, major insurmountable problems they are now in virtually all American cities if we could do away with our dependence on plentiful free parking.
Robotic Parking in Clearwater tried to make a go of it, but results seem less than promised (Jetsons again) Of course, since it's a Scientologist-run company, they'll make it go right just like Elron said it should...
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Daryl Cagle's Professional Cartoonists Index.
Easily the best reason for Slate's continued existence. Oh, that and the fact that Microsoft is willing to hang on to money-losing ventures.
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
not after the incident with the gnaa.
Some time ago, I would estimate 6 or 7 years (I don't have a link) WLS (a Chicago news station) ran a really short piece on something like this. It was essentially a system that doubled available parking space in a garage by allowing a hydraulic lift to lift a single car above another car. This was installed and in use in an apartment at the time.
This shows it's feasable, and necessary in dense neighborhoods such as the North Side where parking really is at a premium (think $200+ a month). This is just the old idea scaled up a bit. :-) When you're charging kinds of rates, and there is that kind of need, it makes sense that someone would want to invest in an automated, vertical parking system.
-Rob
Marriage doesn't have to suck!
I'll get modded down for this, but here goes:
I've never owned a car in my life. I can't drive due to a medical condition. I've managed to get around using public transportation here in the US. Other countries have better systems of public transport.
Cars are a very dangerous form of transportation. We need better ways of addressing these issues. From the article, we have developed ridiculously complicated ways of dealing with part of the problem. Storing the cars. Other parts of the problem include traffic. (When will automated devices begin to lift cars onto seperate freeways or freeway lanes, in order to help traffic congestion?) Then there's the oil thing. But no one wants to use electric cars. I guess "hybrids" are a tiny baby step in the right direction.
When you have to drive 90 minutes from an area you can afford, into an area where you are employed, there is a serious problem and the fancy automobile is not the answer. (apparently public transit isn't the answer either the way it currently works. Some people in california drive 3 hours to get to work.)
So we are able to store the beasts in a way in which they could not be stored before, and the motivation was lack of space... Something is wrong here.
Well I'm waiting for those people tubes, like in Futurama.
Anyway what's also interesting is those grocery stores that work under similiar principles to the car park.
I would imagine anyone with the funds to install such a system would have funding available to install a backup power system for just such a situation. At least I hope that would be the case.
Even so, I guess you wouldn't have much luck with traffic when you got out if none of the traffic lights in the area were working.
I'll sig you upside the head!
It was a carousel-like unit, similar to your multi-CD players. You drive up, leave your car, and the parking platter rotates around and your car is pushed in. Or maybe I made it up. I can't recall...
I'm just waiting for Minority report style transportation. Damn things could drive up the side of the building, and put you right at your door.
Hey, when I lived in Holland, there was a robot store. Just a window with stuff in it... you stick some money into it and an arm comes out and picks up your what you want and drops it in a hole on the side. Open 24h of course.
But hey, no big deal, just a big vending machine, had those since the 50's.
Trevipark, a British firm, has a nice, rather simple technology for modest size parking garages, with several installations in Italy. Trevipark is a silo with a turntable/elevator at the center. This technology is best suited for underground storage. It's elegant in that there's very little visible on the surface.
Parksysteme, in Germany, has been building such systems for forty years. But they haven't had many installations.
An automated garage operated in Manhattan in the 1960s.
None of these systems has reached ten installations.
Thats where the crusher comes in!
You know its a German company when they have a Flash presentation such as this one. Fantastic, really.
What exactly happens if/when the computer running the system screws up and drops your car a couple of storeys or damages it in some other manner? Surely there must be some kind of contingency, like a human supervisor or something; I wouldnt trust my car with a completely automated garage. I suppose it could be exploited though; a spoofed magnetic card might be a valid way to attack this system, like with phone cards and train tickets.
Many people have commented on the fact that Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong have been implementing these systems for many years now.
The obvious observation here is that Japan and Taiwan are island countries with limited real estate and space and spatial efficiency is at a much higher premium there than it is here. Hong Kong has a similar predicament; it is landlocked by the rest of China on three sides and an ocean on the other, and has actively secured borders. (i.e., they can't just annex land or start building strip malls and boulevards like most cities in the US and Europe)
The only American analog I can think of off the top of my head is Manhattan, NYC, but I suspect that instead of being luddites, their motives against implementing such systems are economic in nature as they are the exception to the general American rule in terms of availability of real estate to build parking garages. Being an island nation definitely has influence on cultural and technological development.
Anyway, I suspect that entire graduate theses can be written on such a topic.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
It's not April Fools. Slashdot ran this article on the other US garage, the Hoboken above ground one, back on Sept 24, 2003.
NYC has had these for years; they're 3-4 spaces high, you drive into the space, the guy pushes a button, the car goes up 2-3 levels in the unit. Another car drives up, goes up 1-2. Etc until it's stacked full.
Only problem? Well, I remember a photo of a enraged car owner screaming at a parking attendant on the day of the massive NYC blackout; they're useless in a power outage; you're not getting your car out, and that's that.
"Oh, they must have had backup generators", you say. Ever been to NYC? Everything is done as cheaply as possible. They'd sell your car after you parked it if they thought they could get away with it. They're certainly not going to keep a backup generator around just in case there's a power outage- they're just going to tell you to walk home.
Please help metamoderate.
Actually, slate is/was making a profit http://www.buzzle.com/editorials/text4-29-2003-396 96.asp
why are there so many empty corridors that could be used for parking in these designs? wouldn't it be more efficient, albeit slower, to have one hole somewhere that you push around like in those stupid sliding picture puzzles that they give to children? the longitudinal example is just like parallel parking while keeping a lane open for traffic.
i want a machine that can double park and deal with it.
1. Thou shalt keep thy filthy shitrakes of my Mercedes.
2. Thou shalt know and worship commandment 1.
Also, did anyone look at the link to the Wohr site? Look at the picture. Someones piece of shit, dripping oil, transmission fluid, anti-freeze, etc. on your car from above? I think f*cking not. And not even a parking attendant to beat up on when the robots mangle your car.
This is a guarnateed ruinded paint job at best and a trip to the body shop to replace some crushed in fenders and quarter panels..
This is a CRAP idea and I would NEVER put my car in one of these.. Never..
The solution to congestion at rush hour is for all businesses to recognize that employees arriving at work at varying hours is good for society, and it makes the employees happier to be able to set their own schedule. Since people will show up at much more staggerred times rather than trying to show up for a specific 8am or 8:30am exactly start time, you won't get the 30 minute based congestion. People will need less time driving and more time enjoying their lives, making the society slightly more stress-free. Allowing flex time is good for society.
madra
cam wrote this
More projects ...
And, yes, the Bosporus facility (as referenced by the article for those who did not RTFA) is also there.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
From the article: Because of the cost of the machinery and maintenance, each space in an automated garage costs $25,000, several thousand dollars more than a spot in a conventional lot.
If by "conventional" you mean a surface lot, or even an above-grade parking structure, then this is more costly. But the round number usually used for calculating the cost to construct a below-grade parking structure is $30,000 per space. So this system would *save* money at $25k. It wouldn't even be that bad compared to structured parking, which often runs $15k/space. Those numbers exclude land costs, too... and the robot garage would need less land.
Of course, they may have just not been very specific... perhaps that's $25k *in addition* to the costs to construct the lot itself. We'll never know. (Well, we could find out, but -- Oooh shiny! What was I saying?)
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
What if it's on the top level? Won't be getting dripped on up there. Maybe you could charge sensible people $5 to park, and people who own Mercedes could pay $50 to be on the top level because hey, they care, and you know they can afford it.
Still, sounds like a great idea for a practical joke. Set up some device to drip paint and/or acid onto whatever is below the car. Then send it into the park. Mmmmmmm...
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
Here in Tokyo, there must be thouands of these...Most of them go up - not down - but regardless the idea is the same. Many public parking garages work like this - 10 story buildings that probably only fit 3 or 4 cars across. And, almost all of them are protected by Halon or Carbon Dioxide gas-based fire extinguishing systems....I guess figuring that if a fire broke out inside one of these, it would quickly become a pretty big mess...
There's a small un-lit sign above the entrance to these structures. If the system goes off, the sign lights up saying 'Halon gas released - do not enter' or something to that effect in Japanese...
Here at Saturn, we store our body panels in a similar (nearly identical) system.
The "paint buck" has its Smarteye tag read and the buck gets removed from the carrier and transported down one of several aisles by a rolling lift which transverses either in one direction horizontally or vertically. You get the idea.
The ASRS (Automatic Storage & Retrieval System) makes note of where it got put and then it's off to get the next one.
The empty paint carrier leaves and goes off to get another buck.
When it comes time to load another job on to the line (to be sent to the General Assembly building where the panels will get put onto the spaceframe), the procedure gets repeated in reverse. The lift then finds the panel set of the desired color, gets it, puts it on the carriers that go to GA and then sends it on its way.
BTW, The weight of the paint buck is comparable to that of a car (probably around 3000 pounds). A-yup, they are heavy. It's an "all hands on deck" event when one of these falls off of its carrier over in our building.
Most of the time things work flawlessly, however...
The ASRS has been known to overtravel in the past and wipe out the sprinkler heads.
Has been known to put the buck in the wrong hole.
Has been known to retrieve the wrong paint buck.
Has been known to not retrieve anything.
Has been known to dump the paint bucks off from about 60 feet up (everybody out?)
Has been known to have the lift fail.
Has been known to get partially stuck, forcing Maintenance folks to perform death-defying feats to get the damm things unstuck.
So, no riding in the car when it's getting stored or retrieved.
Beware of fire and flood.
And eventually (probably soon) things will begin to wear out and the system will inevitably need to be serviced while it's getting your car.
I'm sure that it will be only a matter of time before somebody's Rolls gets upended. Read the fine print on the parking spot agreement.
John
I recently saw a bit on TV where they used a similar storage system for Internet deliveries. You know the problem: Order something from an online store, go to work, arrive back home at 18:00 some day and find a nice piece of paper in your mailbox informing you that the mailman couldn't see you in person and thus dropped off your package at the post office where you can 'conveniently' fetch it during the time you're supposed to be at work.
Arg, hit Enter for a new line and Submit was somehow selected... anyway:
...).
;)
The solution for the problem above: The goods Storage tower. Basically it operates like a giant tape robot (or those parking systems) only it stores the goods you ordered. The process is this:
- Order from an online store, indicate 'the tower' as the delivery address (requires cooperation from the online store of course)
- Store packs your stuff, drives up to the tower, puts it into the standard boxes there and taps in your code.
- The tower takes a picture of the contents of your box and notifies you that your goods have arrived (via the web, SMS,
- You drive up to the tower at any time that is convenient to you (it's up and running 24/7), punch in your code, the bot fetches your box and lets you take out your goods.
They even remembered to put it specially cooled slots so it is also suitable for grocery deliveries etc... and if ever one of those packages isn't retrieved within a certain timeframe (was it 4 days? Can't remember) the tower notifes somebody from the company to come and clean out that compartiment to avoid the food rotting in there.
I want one of those towers right accross the street NOW!
Just remembered the name of the company, here's their website (in German though):
http://www.tower24.de
If it's over 6 feet 6 inches, a sign on the back wall says you're out of luck. Anything over 5,500 pounds doesn't work either, to the dismay of one Grand Parc resident with a hefty Volvo SUV.
The biggest Volvo SUV in production is the XC90. It stands 5.7' in height and weighs in at 4,493lbs. It's width is not any different than what you would find on any passenger car (~74").
This is not considered a "hefty" SUV. It's lighter and smaller than my old Volvo wagon. It's actually kind of dinky when compared to most SUV's these days.
They had garages like that in Japan back in the 1960s. And I'm not talking Tokyo either, I'm talking secondary cities.
1) Build apartment buildings without any parking space.
2) Reclaim 50% of all parking space on the street.
3) Bitch about people parking everywhere and hire "parking police" that hands out tickets left and right
4) Profit!!!
Hi I live in Tokyo we have loads of them here. Some of them you can sit down and wait until your car is showing up in front of you. Expensive as hell like everything here. I have one in my house as well. Lars
So, riding mass transit costs me about twice what it costs me to drive myself on a per-mile basis, or over SIX TIMES what in costs me in absolute terms;
Except for the price of the car/insurance/maintenance, of course.
One member of a family routinely using alternate transport (bus/bike/carpool) allows a two car family to become a one car family. With the attendant huge financial savings.
That's nothing.
I have 4.3 light-years to my office on a planet orbiting Alpha Centuri.
It takes me about 7 months to get there, with public transport.
I used to be able to get there in 5.8 months using my personal hyper-ship, then they converted all of Hyperspace to H.O.V.
Frikkin' bureaucrats.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
Then I thought about transit time, gas, and depreciation on my car. So I decided $300-400 more a month was more than worth it to get to spend an extra 60 - 90 minutes a workday with my wife & my dog, to save more than $100 a month on gas, and put less than 2000 miles on my car commuting in a year. All together, I probably pay $2 for each of those extra hours I spend at home.
(Most) people live in the suburbs because a big house seems more important than some extra time at home. (Unless they work in DC. Then they just don't want to get mugged.) ;)
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
wonder what happens when joe six pack calls his car forth from the coffee bar, forgets about it, somebody else goes into the garage swipes their card to get rid of it, and it gets sent off into the abyss
I bike to work now. Save for the summer smog (see above) it's great! Oh, and my old house appreciated in value by 100% in 5 years. Thanks!
You reap what you sow. If you're serious about hating the look (and land use policies) of where you live, then move. But you'll have to get used to being around people that aren't uniformly Republican ...
One simple rule for its versus it's
The highway budget is largely paid for through gas taxes, so as long as you're paying them, you're already paying real costs.
The mass transit budget, on the other hand, amounts to a subsidy of several dollars per ride for Metro-style systems.
The real issue, though, is quality of life. If you're spending four hours a day travelling to work, and you could spend 40 minutes a day instead, I think almost any sane person would choose the car as long as the cost was in any way affordable.
If you value your time as low as $10 an hour, that means you're spending about $40 a day in public transit instead of around $6 a day. Multiply those out over a year and you're talking about $10,200 for public transit versus $1,530 for the car. Can you run a car for under the difference between $10,200 and $1,530? Well, yes.
Granted, this $10 an hour isn't revenue you can actually get if you forego public transport. But if you have some project you're doing in your spare time, and it enables you to actually have spare time, clearly it's well worth it.
D
I found it more readable if I pictured it coming from someone with a heavy Russian accent who has just learned english :)
The only thing that I can see beeing problematic is time of transit to get your car. Anyone who has ever lived in a high rise knows that having good elevators is key, otherwise your travel from 30th floor to the ground level might take 10 minutes itself. This system is similar to a high rises elevator system, it has to be fast and efficient to be tolerable. No one would want to wait in line during rush hour 15 minutes for your car to be retrieved.
Okay, since my public transport agency was kind enough to send me a free pass so I could try it out, let's try using public transport in my area.
First, I couldn't use my own address because it's high up in the hills and is nowhere near any public transit. In fact, the streets near my home are so narrow no bus could get through even if it needed to. So if I love my hillside lifestyle, which I do, I simply can't use public transit at all. Traffic density on my street is about one car every ten minutes.
But let's say I'm on the closest major street, which is about a five minute drive from me. I want to go to my work, which would take appoximately 10 minutes via car. It would also cost $2.50 each way, or $5 a day.
Here's the route. If you're too lazy to click on the link, be aware that it would take one hour and 20 minutes to get to my work. That's EIGHT TIMES what it takes by car.
I drive a gas-guzzler car that gets about 14 miles per gallon. It's a Mercedes sedan with leather seating and good handling. I enjoy driving it down the beautiful leafy hillside roads of my community. It's about three miles to work. At $2.50 a gallon (premium fuel, you know), it would cost about $1.07 to go to work and back every day.
Clearly, public transport doesn't work in my community. And the only way it would work, is if we all lived in massive, ugly apartment buildings on the same streets. Now, I don't know about you, but I really, really don't like massive, ugly apartment buildings.
So what's the solution? Live close to your work. As already noted, I have a ten minute commute each way, with no traffic congestion whatsoever, even though I live in a busy Los Angeles suburb which has huge amounts of commercial activity.
It's not perfection but I can't think of a better alternative that would work for me. The only real flaw is that I really lucked out in buying my house three months ago; I could not have afforded its value today (!).
D
There was/is a garage on LaSalle Street in Chicago where I used to go when visiting a law office next door, and it was quite old. It was also able to lift my 1970 Cadillac which was very cool. The cars would be placed in slots like a giant Matchbox display. This is old tech to say the least. It may not have been fromm the 20's, but it was no more recent than the very early fifties.
Personally, I'd like a system like this to store all my shit at home.
...except for cars instead of carts!
That's about eight blocks from where I live. I'm also in DC. I'm going to go try and find it today! I'll admit - I've lived in the area almost my whole life and this is the first I've heard of this!
I want one!
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
This is a guarnateed ruinded paint job at best and a trip to the body shop to replace some crushed in fenders and quarter panels..
I doubt it, do you think people would pay $25,000 for a parking space that ruined their car every time that they parked in it? Do you think that there would be any of these garages anywhere if that were the case? I would feel safer leaving my car in one of these walled parking spots than letting someone park next to me and open their door into mine.
WoW: Scheod 70 orc warlock on Shadowmoon
It's never too late to start over.
Breathe, man. Come on, this is just a big geometry & mechanics problem. Essentially, if you can fit your car into some sort of box, you can make allowance for the whole volume of that box when rotating & moving the car. Unless you park like a North-Dakotan (read: the painted lines are seen as a centerline (and then parked diagonally on)) or your car has wing-like protrusions, you can ensure no edge of your car will extend out of the virtual box (which, btw is probably enforced by some sort of walls delineating the area within which it is safe to park). Thereby, by the laws of physics and ...
Fuck it. If you really are that paranoid, sell your car, buy a tent, move away from people. Can't help you.
- Looks a lot like something we have here in Florida for boats, except the robot is replaced by a forklift jockey.
One potential problem for suffering city dwellers: long lines at rush hour
I say: Bartender, make that a double, my car's in the garage, and I can see there's a long line.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Or at least, that's the theory...
Unfortunately, stupid WMATA has the metro run at half the frequency at the Greenbelt station (which has a huge parking lot, and is almost directly on an offramp from the beltway). Full schedule only starts at College park, the next station. Incidentally, it only has a tiny parking lot, and is quite inside Washington already. (At least, that's how it was when I visited a couple of years ago)
I never understood what the thinking behind that was. Why not do full service from/to the station where (presumably) most people would get on/off.
Say no to software patents.
In this somewhat (but not exceptionally) cramped city (Milan, Italy) we've had examples residential automated parking systems since the late 1960s or so.
All electromechanical. Same tech as in elevators and assembly lines. You stick your key in your own switch-lock, and your car (or your own empty car-tray, which sits on a carouselling chain) is lined up with the gate. No built-in intelligence required beyond deciding which way to move the whole chain. No space wasted to make way for a single-car-shifting system. Only problem, you move ALL cars, ALL the time.
The downside is that they can only do one or so at a time, and when the clubs close and you're on your way out, you have to linger with all the other club trash while waiting to get your wheels.
or more appropriately, their insurance company pays.
Caddy takes plunge at high-tech garage
The other high tech parking garage that they alluded to in the subject article is located in Hoboken, NJ, a stone's throw from NYC. In this particular case, a Cadillac DeVille was pushed off its pallet and smashed into oblivion due to the trunk popping open during retrieval. The trunk apparently clipped the machinery or something like that. Heh. The Hoboken municipal garage, by the way, is very similar to what they mention here but has a far higher capacity. It looks like a row of upscale apartments. It went far over budget and was finished quite late. It too resulted in a cost of about $25,000 a parking space. However, Hoboken is absolutely atrocious when it comes to parking... even more so than many parts of Manhattan. Simply no parking during the day, no parking at night. If you want a garage space for a weekend night, that's a cool $20 right there. Because these garages save a lot of space... and space is at quite a premium around this area... they do make a lot of sense. No, these garages don't make sense in the middle of Iowa or Idaho. Sort of like it doesn't make sense to buy a pickup truck to commute from Brooklyn to Manhattan every day.
You had a decent point then had to fuck it up with "Look at what a cool expensive car I have! See how great I am because of my car!"
Like we fucking give a good goddamn that you own a Mercedes.
Fuck you and your posessions.
"You are not yer fuckin' khakis."
s'wut i sed.
"Delivery of trash from the building to the street would also be handled by the parking mechanism, the developer said. Trash would be stored under the building in a refrigerated dumpster. On trash collection day, the parking system calls for the dumpster the same way it would summon a car."
I don't know exactly how this machinery works (I did read TFA) but it doesn't sound like it would work with Disneyland. It would need capacity to hold tens of thousands of cars, first off. Secondly, everyone would get there at the same time and leave at the same time. Not to mention that if they gave people RFID tags to retrieve their cars, or whatever they use, they'd get lost like crazy, and then what'd you do?
Considering that space isn't at a huge premium in Anaheim (even across the street from the main gates at Disneyland there are still some empty lots), I doubt that using something like this would ever become worthwhile.
If space right around Disneyland ever becomes cramped, they can always buy some space somewhere else, put in a parking lot/structure and tram people in, like they do already. The employee parking lots are even farther than the guest parking structure, but Disney provides a free shuttle.
I take that A/C tunnel all the time - it's not at maximum *physical* capacity. I expect they mean maximum capacity of the current signaling system. That system still has old BMT/IRT/IND incompatibilities undermining (heh ;) its economies of scale, as well as all kinds of vertical integration straitjackes preventing interop with open digital signaling network systems. So it really all should go, through attrition, starting with the A/C tunnel. After looking at real traffic analysis I would decide whether to include the LIRR tunnel from the Atlantic yards out to Broadway Junction. What I have in mind is a car train, a continuous nonstop conveyor belt that ferries cars from downtown Brooklyn to JFK. Paralleled with the Super Shuttle for passengers only from WTC (or Atlantic Ave, if really necessary).
:).
Looping the ends of the subway lines means connecting the ends of, eg., the B/Q, F, N and D out in Coney Island to Brighton Beach, with a moving sidewalk at first, then actual trains (B/Q D making 4 station stops). That allows passengers at the ends of those lines to quickly get among neighborhoods at those old terminal ends, without the 1.5h trip connecting through Atlantic & Pacific. Many times more passengers would actually take the new "shortcut", and traffic would be diffused through greater capacitance, relieving downtown Brooklyn congestion, with its ripple effect throughout the system. Likewise through Van Cortlandt Park, connecting the terminals of the 1/9, 4, B/Q, 2, 5, maybe even the 6. Connect the A:207St with the 1/9:207St. The 3:148St with B/C:145St. It's a linear extension of the benefits of a Queens/boro Plaza superstation. A connection across 125St through 1/9, A/B/C/D, 2/3, 4/5/6 would let Upper East/West siders quickly intercommute, without tonight's nightmare on their downtown platforms and the overwhelming congestion in Midtown. These efficiency gains would leverage existing capacity for faster trips, safer platforms, more diffused system wear, by breaking bottlenecks dating back a century to the days of intercompany competition.
The AirTrain is better than nothing, but not as good (cheap, quickly available, effective) as a WTC/JFK A/C Super Shuttle upgrade. But I'm all for building more rail infrastructure, as long as it can interoperate with the rest of the system. Giuliani will go down in history as a longterm visionary when rights of way through Nassau/Queens like the AirTrain are much harder to obtain. But a better managed growth would have had the A/C Super Shuttle running up revenue and traffic by 1996, during the boom, to invest in longer range urban planning. Oh, that's right, NYC - urban planning means synchronizing 5 taxis of friends converging on Barney's
These loops are through stations along parks (where construction won't disturb traffic), determined visually by inspecting the demented-projection MTA subway maps. I'd love to run a network traffic analysis of the NYC Transit system, with real demand/routing data from at least MetroCard DBs, showing all the optimization low hanging fruit. In fact, the real revolution will come from applying digital network topology techinques and tools to the transit system. Packet switched cars along higher-degree topology rail nets is just one analogy applicable to transit; I expect feedback the other way might teach us something about moving bits, too. And mirroring some of the signaling with the routing in the system will make the map better fit the territory, with vast gains in the quality of life of all New Yorkers, including ripples out to nonriders as well.
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make install -not war
Exhibit A: Many single parent households
Exhibit B: Low education levels
Conclusion: Very high crime rate