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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."
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...
Your car is much harder to steal. Two layers of security, not just one - but it is a cool hacking challenge. Any takers?
webpage
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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