Slashdot Mirror
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."
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...
Available here.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
DC Press release
Space saver company
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.
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.
You know its a German company when they have a Flash presentation such as this one. Fantastic, really.
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 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.
Part of the reason it works is because they don't have to put enough space between the cars for people to get in and out the doors. So, no, even if you could walk up and say hi to your car when it's down there, you couldn't get anything out of it.
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
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.
The problem is, all kinds of research has shown that parking (and highways, roads, all private transportation infrastructure) operates on an "if you build it, they will come" principle. If you build 150% of "capacity," one of two things will happen: either a third of your parking spaces will be empty even during Christmas Eve shopping frenzy (because you really did build 50% over capacity needs), or you will have 50% more cars there than before (because the place is in such high demand that parking is a limiting factor).
Unless, of course, you *charge* for parking. Properly priced parking can manage demand very effectively. Old Pasadena is a good example of this. Expensive parking meters that operate until midnight keep street spaces at high turnover for people stopping in quick here or there, while slightly lower-priced municipal garages take the longer-term cars off the street and leave people free to wander around. And they do... the place is *packed* with pedestrians on Friday and Saturday nights, and many other times during the week too. Now that you can take the Metro Gold Line there, it's even better.
Sorry I didn't provide any links, but if you're really interested, look into the work of Donald Shoup at UCLA. He's the parking god.
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
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...
So your precious fsck'ing Mercedes would be fine.
Never never never smoke crack before geometry class!
Just remembered the name of the company, here's their website (in German though):
http://www.tower24.de
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.