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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."
Your car is much harder to steal. Two layers of security, not just one - but it is a cool hacking challenge. Any takers?
webpage
As if it would be more convenient for us suburban types to walk a few miles (about 4 where I am) in the rain to get to a bus stop. And since there are only a handful of buses that come near me, I would have to forgo anything in my schedule that happens before 1100 am.
When I lived downtown, I rode the bus back and forth everywhere. But times change, fares go up, schedules get changed for more "efficiency", and the end result is that riding the bus is no longer an attractive option for me.
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
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.
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.
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make install -not war
There are some people for whom public transit isn't an option. You ever think about taking an 80lb concert grand harp on a train or bus? No, I didn't think so. I know several professional harpists that would have that limitation. String bass would be tricky too. Oh, and what about chefs carrying their knives? What do they do when they can't carry their tools of the trade around because of antiterrorist paranoia? The Boy Scouts, heading on a camping trip, each needing around 60lb of gear? There are plenty of people for whom public transit will never be an option at all. Don't try and shove it down their throats. I don't deny that for many people, public transit is a viable solution. For some, however, it is impractical or substantially more expensive than owning and using a car.
You should use AdiumX on your Mac.
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.
You *average* 60 mph on a 15 mile journey door to door?! Allowing for the necessary slow parts at each end that means you must be doing well over 100 mph in the middle.
Hide in the trunk, then after the car is loaded in, fold the seat down, climb out and break into the other cars, steal some things you like, load them into your car and have your friend recall the vehicle. Sounds fairly easy to pull off.
//Blessed are they that run around in circles, for they shall be known as wheels.
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.
As if it would be more convenient for us suburban types to walk a few miles...When I lived downtown, I rode the bus back and forth everywhere.
You chose to live in a place without accessible transit. Sure, you probably had your reasons... of course, if our public policy didn't encourage people to buy as much house as they can possibly afford, and we didn't make it so much cheaper to develop in the outskirts than in the city, your choice might have been different. But it's still the choice you made.
Where do you work? Do you commute to a place where you're competing with tens of thousands of other people for road space? If so, then moving out to the suburbs just made everything that tiny bit worse for all of us. If you work at home or somewhere near where you live, then it makes a bit more sense.
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
In most American cities, the auto-park is a solution looking for a problem. The machinery itself is fairly complex to build and maintain. The average cost of a parking spot in the auto-park is $25,000. In most American cities, the average cost of a parking spot is a lot less than that. Now you tell me which is the "waste of money".
Hm... UCLA spent $38,000 per space to dig up the IM field and build a parking garage under it (then put the field back). Granted, that's somewhat extreme, but the typical cost used to calculate the price of building a below-grade parking garage in an urban environment these days is $30,000 per space, excluding land costs. For comparison, a surface lot is about $7,000/space and a parking structure is around $15,000.
Huhh?? What does expensive stack parking have to do with pollution? I hope you're not suggesting that the extra 100 yards a car has to drive in your average parking lot is a measurable source of pollution. Ditto for sprawl.
Pollution: the Annual Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) by people *looking for a cheap parking space* is astonishing. I'm too lazy to dig up my notes right now, but a study done in Westwood Village (home to UCLA) found that the average person circled for 3 minutes looking for street parking there (because it's significantly cheaper than structure parking, which generally isn't full). The math came out to some staggering total like 90,000 Annual VMT just from those people circling.
So, having structured parking that you just drive in and leave your car could significantly reduce VMT if it got people to stop circling. You also have to price alternatives correctly though.
Sprawl: When you have to build 2 parking spaces per apartment, it drives up development costs very quickly. It also drives down your FAR (Floor Area Ratio). You end up building fewer, bigger apartments, because then you have to build less parking. In either event, though, you have to buy a lot of land.
Now, let's see... if I need a whole lot of land, will I get it cheaper in the central city, or on the outskirts? Where will I have fewer complaints from the neighbors about noise from construction (because there are fewer neighbors anyway)? Where am I more likely to avoid toxic cleanup issues, especially if I don't have to dig underground to build parking? Gee, I wonder...
The best solution, of course, is to reduce the demand for parking (by pricing driving and parking appropriately and making alternatives more attractive), and reduce the acreage needs of development that way. But, if you can build a municipal parking structure in a more compact place, and then let developer in-lieu fees pay for it (they pay a fee per space that they don't have to provide, since the parking is already there), you make developing in urbanized areas more attractive again.
the value proposition is just not there for the majority of places. Once the value proposition gets there, there will be more of these around.
Well, sure. But no one's trying to build these in Enid, Oklahoma. On the other hand, Enid isn't trying to figure out where they're going to put the 50% population increase they're expecting in the next two decades, either. Southern California has been promised (by the gurus at the Census Bureau, I think... who usually have underestimated us in the past) that the equivalent of "two Chicagos" will be added to the region's population by 2025. And they'll probably all bring a gigantic SUV with them, unless we do something...
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
That's more a product of evolution than planning, I'd think. Cities in europe got their start when everyone travelled by foot. Cities in America caught the tailend of that, and as the population spread westward transportation got easier, culminating with the auto.
;) the most from modern transportation.
Drive through any old US city like NYC or Chicago, and the highways will be crammed into two lanes with a confusing braid of onramps and offramps. Regions like Seattle or the SF bay on the west coast have massive 8 lane highways and a number of tributaries (expressways, etc) feeding cars into local streets.
That part of the world is the newest, so it benefits (though I suppose the use of "benefits" is a potential debate topic
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
"You chose to live in a place without accessible transit. Sure, you probably had your reasons..."
No, I think you decided what you had to say before you read his post though: *They moved the route!*
Never the less. I have lived here near DC and have used both public transit and driven to work. About an equal amount of each.
I was inclined to use mass transit when my hours were both fixed, and normal. If your hours are unpredictable, as many are these days, you can get screwed. Parking lots that feed the metro system here in DC fill up between 8AM and 9AM. Shortly after that the busses go into a reduced schedule, then stop running completely in many places except for the morning and afternoon rush. Makes perfect sense doesn't it? Using mass transit with even a slightly shifted schedule here is almost impossible. The system runs at full capacity for a couple hours every morning and afternoon and then dries up almost completely, simply because there is no way to get to it.
But that doesn't stop people from saying data-free things like "if more people would just use mass transit, things would be so much better".
Most of these systems run at a loss. They almost all were built on a model that said they could run profitably if ridership were "X" and now in most cases ridership is "2X" or more.
Thats not to mention recent finding that there is little or no preparedness for terrorism in these systems. Guess what? They "forgot" to deal with that issue, and now they will need more money for that. They also "forgot" what they did with millions of dollars in parking fees for the system, and yes, they will need more money(!) to automate their money tracking system better so they don't lose so much money in the future. Maybe.
These systems become huge bureaucratic sinkholes, with nobody really claiming responsibility for anything that happens. In the end, taxpayers anywhere in the vicinity of these systems end up footing the bill for all the waste, and politicians who get chauffeured to work utter platitudes about increasing ridership to solve all problems.
Is the answer for everyone to get a low gas mileage SUV and drive 75 miles to work every day? No. But there are lots of alternatives. Fuel efficient cars. Car pooling. An for the vast majority of information/office workers, simply STAY HOME. Our problems with this are way more cultural than technological. Very few people who work for the federal government can work at home. They have to show up. To see, and be seen by all the other people who show up. Never mind what they accomplish, or fail to accomplish. They were there for roll call, now where is the paycheck?
Many people who live only a few hours from these urban eye-sores drive economy cars, work a few miles away at the hardware store or coffee shop. They don't breath polluted air. They don't drink lead contaminated water (that DC city officials "forgot" to tell anyone about).
The solution to many of these problems is to stop cramming people into high rise buildings where they live and bussing them to high rise building where they work. That model fails to produce quality of life wherever it has been tried worldwide.
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!
That certainly fits the description of Manhattan and quite a few people disagree with your sentiment based on what the market will bear for housing on the island. Density can also bring some advantages as well as disadvantages. People prefer different things.
For example, I tend to like the Phoenix area. There are millions of people there and hence you get the services, stores, etc, that cater to that kind of density, but the place is spread out very very thin. Designing a transit systme there is very difficult because, except for a somewhat traditional downtown area, most people just criss-cross across the valley to go to work.
My wife, on the other hand, prefers large cities because everything is close together and more vibriant. She also points out that she lived in Los Angeles area when she was younger, that was like Phoenix is now a few decades ago, and that all of that new construction just slowly turns to shit and you eventually get mile after mile of rundown crap that all looks the same. She expects the Phoenix valley will turn into LA eventually.
I have lived here near DC and have used both public transit and driven to work. About an equal amount of each.
I wish I could say the same...
My daily commute from Virginia to DC is about 9 miles one-way across the Woodrow Wilson Bridge. Anybody who has lived in the DC/VA/MD area knows what a PITA that route can be. I also drive a hybrid, so I get great gas mileage and super-ultra-low emissions. I'm not just saying that; the car is rated as a SULEV. So when I sit in rush-hour traffic, I'm generally not burning any gas.
One day I rode the bus/train to work because (a) My car was somewhere else and (b) I wanted to know how long it would take in case I had to do it repeatedly.
My findings?
When I leave the house at 6:30am, I get to work around 6:50. At 45 MPG and 90 miles/week, that's two gallons of gas. At $1.75/gallon, that's $3.50 work of fuel I burn in my commute every week. Per mile, my commute costs me 3.8 cents per mile in fuel.
If, OTOH, I take the metro, I have to leave the house at 6:30 via the free shuttle from my place to the closest metro station, take the train into DC, transfer to another train, ride to another station, transfer to a bus, and ride the bus to the stop outside the office. That trip runs me about $2.75 ONE WAY and takes two hours. Total cost: $22.50 per week in metro fares. Now, taking into account that the run also covers roughly 3x the distance, that comes to about 8.3 cents per mile.
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; but that's of course made up for by the fact that the commute takes six times as long.
Fortunately I don't pay for parking, so I do have a big advantage there. If I paid for parking, then the story changes dramatically.
In short--I'll continue to drive myself to work in the morning.
Not to say that there aren't other times I'll take the metro to other places because of the convenience of not having to pay for parking or even finding a spot; I don't drive into downtown DC unless I have to, because traffic is a g-- d--- nightmare.
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?