Hoboken, NJ vs. Giant Parking Robot

markwalling writes "Wired News is running a story about Hoboken, New Jersey's battles with robotic parking. A legal battle over the license had shut down the garage, essentially trapping hundreds of cars inside. Bill Coats has recommended that the parking garage be run off open source software: 'Vendees are going to become more sophisticated in the deals they enter into.' Coats even sees this as a driver of open source software. 'If you can get (open source software) you can't be shut down.' But that's harder to do in highly custom applications."

Comments

Re:A who did what to who?

[qbwiz]

Robots are controlled by computers, with software. The city used to have a license for the software to operate the robots. Now they don't, so they can't operate the robots to remove the cars. If the software was open source, they would still have the license for it, so they could still use the robots.

Re:Pictures?

[penix1]

http://www.woehr.de/engl/source/frameset.htm

Re:Thievery

[Timesprout]

The fee was decided in arbitration after the city apparently thought they could pull a fast one on a contract they had agreed to and ended up shooting themselves in the foot.

Re:Pictures?

[LordKronos]

Heres another site with some animations showing how it works:
http://www.robopark.com/

Looking at the site you posted, it looks like the cars are stacked on top each other, with nothing in between (or if there is anything, you can't see it. I'd sure hate to have someone's clunker dripping oil onto my windshield.

Re:Thievery

[cdrudge]

Presuming a 30-month, there are 720 hours in that month. NJ state mimimum wage goes up to 7.15 on Oct 1st. At that rate, that's A 24-hour a day parking attendant would cost 5148. $5500 a month in software developer fees was just paid for by the former attendant.

Articles w/more background info

[allankim]

From http://www.nj.com/news/jjournal/index.ssf?/base/ne ws-0/1154154297217660.xml&coll=3

Patrick Ricciardi, the city's information technology officer, who took over at the garage after Robotics left, said codes used to operate several dozen components were inexplicably changed overnight.

Workers then had to manually reassign numbers to each module because Robotics did not leave a manual behind.

"This is usually done through the computer, but since we don't have a manual, we can't do it that way," Ricciardi said.

Dennis Clarke, general manager of Robotics, said the city has no right to an operating manual.

"If you own the copyright, you have a right to use it," Clarke said. "They are not entitled to our source codes. This is very critical proprietary information covered under contract law and intellectual properties."

Hmmm, sounds like someone has been taking lessons from Darl McBride ...

And from http://www.hudsonreporter.com/site/news.cfm?BRD=12 91&dept_id=523585&newsid=16980856&PAG=461&rfi=9

When the 916 Garden St. Garage - a unique automatic facility - opened in Oct. 2002, it was years late and already millions of dollars over budget.

Problems during construction created deeply embedded professional, legal, and personal animosity between the city and Robotic Parking. The city blamed Robotic for the delays, while Robotic blamed the city and another contractor.

Since the opening, there have been highly publicized problems at the garage. Two vehicles were totaled after they fell inside the garage. In October, 2005, Corea posted a letter to patrons warning that if they decide to keep using the automated garage, they would "have to accept the fact that there may be many future delays."

Robotic counters that Corea is overstating any malfunctions as part of a smear campaign against Robotic. Clarke said that the garage has a "reliability rating of 99.99 percent" and that the garage had been down less than total of 30 hours since it has opened. ...

The HPU's current contract with Robotic Parking is $23,250. Corea told the council that on June 22, Robotic officials made a demand to increase the fee to $27,900 per month, which the City Council has said that it will not accept. Robotic contended that a $4,650 is a reasonable moderate monthly increase.

I guess 99.99% reliability means only one in 10,000 cars gets totaled.

I am a Hoboken, New Jersey resident

[LilBlackDemon]

As a Hoboken resident, I can tell you that the parking situation is horrendous. There are many times that the city's very narrow streets are either nearly impassible or just impassible because of the parking problems. At one point a few years ago, the mayor put the city under an illegal lockdown because the parking problems were just so severe.

There are a few major parking garages in the city, and parking is a high premium. Also, there is a college (Stevens Institute of Technology, where I attend classes) that takes up a large portion of the city with its own parking lots. There is a long-standing conflict over the parking the school would provide to the city in one of its new buildings.

The city is very small (approximately 2 square miles) and very dense (approximately 500,000 full-times residents). The reason for the size and density is the city's proximity to downtown Manhattan and the financial district (the city is quite literally directly across the Hudson River from downtown and midtown Manhattan). The road system dates back to the late 1600s and is mostly very narrow streets with limited parking. This is something that I can't stress enough, as its a cause of the traffic and parking problems.

These lots were designed as a means to try to get rid of some blockages and to provide parking to residents. Unfortunately, the effect was relatively limited. The garage was an extra fee on top of an already-required Hoboken-specific decal for parking four or more hours.

That said, with the problems that the city government has had in the past, it doesn't surprise me that something like this would be done. It's not so much an argument of open-source versus closed-source software, as it is about government responsibility. The city, to my knowledge, did not take account of the fact that the contract was to end in a few days, or that there were residents' cars in the lot. Instead of posting notices that the cars had to be emptied on this date (in order to remove the equipment, this just "happened."

City government and its poor planning is to blame for this, not software liscensing and F/LOSS vs. closed source.