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."

Comments

Not new news

[gnuman99]

I've heard of these types of parking lots being operational in places in Japan and Hong Kong for a number of years now.

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...

Re:Not new news

[cmacb]

"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.

Pictures and Details

[nacturation]

Available here.

I can picture it now

[dicepackage]

Having some guy with a crappy car dripping oil down on your convertable.

car dispenser?

[Doc Ruby]

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.