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Science Technology

Parking Garage Of The Future 111

Posted by timothy from the ferris-bueller-would-be-pleased dept.
Spunk writes "Like something out of the Jetsons, this NYTimes article [no-reg link] describes a parking garage that automatically stores cars in a 3-dimensional grid, and retrieves them when you return. Europe and Asia have several already."
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Parking Garage Of The Future More

Parking Garage Of The Future

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  • ...the U.S. has had marinas doing this for boats for many years. I'm curious, though, about what happens when the power goes out, like it did in the mid-atlantic states this past week?
    • And boy, I wonder how they handle rush hour with a system like this... What if all 324 people want to get out at the same time?

      324 cars
      *2.5 mins/car

      /2 elevators
      =405 minutes or 6.75 hours to get them all!
      • In the current system, what happens when 324 people want to get into their cars and try to drive out? I would suspect that the wait would be even longer. You would then be relying upon several hundred people to cooperate. Plus you would have more emmisions with all the cars sitting idle.
      • Many of the parking garages in NY as well as other major cities do not allow people to retrieve their own car anyway. There is a staff of people who get the cars. It can normally take 5-10 minutes to get a car from one of these garages with wait times longer during rush hour.

        I imagine the designers in a high traffic area would add more elevators to compensate. Not to mention it isn't likely that all 324 would want out at once. Most people leave work between 3 and 7 with a spike at 5. As long as it can
        • A point that you allude to but don't quite get there brings into play the beautiful fact that the whole thing is computerized. This allows for to 8-5 driver's car to be placed in the slowest to retrieve location at 8, and shifted to the quick location during downtime around 4:30 or so, ready for when they arrive. Very cool indeed. I want one!

      • First, the vast majority of people in Hoboken use mass transit; we're just across the river from NYC, minutes away from Jersey City & Newark via train.

        Second, the density of bars & taverns in Hoboken is greater than anywhere else in New Jersey; after work, there's no great rush to get home and drive anywhere.

    • Re:Not much new here... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by fm6 ( 162816 )

      ...what happens when the power goes out, like it did in the mid-atlantic states this past week?

      You're screwed, of course. Just like the people who couldn't get their cars out of our company garage during the last blackout. Supposedly there was a way to operate the security curtains without power, but the guy who knew how to do it was off that week. Being dangerously dependent on technology that goes away with the first infrastructure glitch is nothing new.

      I seem to recall seeing one of these in a 50s cr

      • Supposedly there was a way to operate the security curtains without power

        No one had a baby-killing SUV to drive through the gate, I call shenanigans
        • No, there were several. I mean, this was a major software firm, it's practically mandatory. I guess nobody wanted to scratch their paint.
          • Pansies, it is urbanites like that that piss me off. It used to be, you bought an SUV b/c you had the triple requirements of more than one (small) child, needed 4WD to get your job(s) done, and needed the ground clearance of a truck. SUV's cost about the same as the truck packages they were based on (1/2 or 3/4 ton shortbed trucks) and could be bought without 4 10-way powered and heated captains chairs . Fast forward to today, a full-size truck-based SUV with a V8 costs more than my parents house did 20
            • Silicon Valley pansies like serious SUVs because all that metal gives them the illusion that they're protected from "all those bad drivers" (a class nobody will admit to actually belonging to, no matter how much they speed or jump lanes). Of course, the tendency of any truck-like vehicle to tip at high speeds kind of wipes out any safety advantage -- but it's the feeling of safety that counts. You can't get that illusion from a fake SUV like the Tracker or Rio.

              • HA! I love the sight of a tiny chick sitting in a Ford Excursion, just barely able to see over the steering wheel.

                ... and dents and scratches all over the truck from the many fender-benders.

                Oh, oh... or all the k3wl SUVs stranded all over the highway during a snow storm. Yes, 4WD will keep you moving; that doesn't mean you're going to have absolute control at 70 MPH in a blizzard. It's great to carefully pilot my Saturn past SUVs in ditches or tettering over the center median divider.

                • Yeah, it's great fun to sneer at all those idiots in their SUVs. I just hope I never collide with one. Or am driving nearby when they decide to show off their acrobatic capabilities.

                  OK, this yuppie-SUV-bashing thread is pretty long by now, and we havent' gotten flamed by any SUV lovers yet. Chicken?

                  Another sad thought: the next governor of California may be the idiot [anecdotage.com] who started the whole SUV thing, when he decided that a HUMV made a good city car!

      • I seem to recall seeing one of these in a 50s crime movie.

        RTFA - the NYT article discusses and has a pic of one the '50s era garages in NYC. They have elevators which lets them save the ramp space, but rely on valets to park the cars on each level - the article says 8 valets are needed during peak periods. I believe the one and only time I had to park in Manhattan I parked in one of them.

        The new system has only two staff, and it sounded like they could get by with having only one working at a time if
    • I don't see any reason you couldn't have a generator on site, though in cities you mostly have to run natural gas generators. Cisco in Santa Cruz got a nice Onan natural gas generator, it was tolerably quiet. You don't need to supply 100% of working power anyway, you can run one motor at half power, if you're geared low enough, instead of both motors at half power, and still get around, just slower.

  • Japan has used them for years... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by orn ( 34773 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2003 @12:22PM (#7044966)
    When in Japan for work, I found these at lots of buildings. I thought of them as car vending machines - stick a ticket in, get a car out.

    They even used a giant motorized lazy susan to turn your car around for you.

    What a great country.

    • I loved those things when I was there. It was another example of Japan's great will to use engineering to overcome the problems of their population density and the ludicrous price of real-estate there. I always wondered how they'd fare in America.
  • Why future?
    Several such parking systems are already in use in different countries.
    There is one near Lugano (Campione) in Switzerland, and I saw one in Japan [inf.ethz.ch].
  • It is just me, or does this remind you of a gigantic CD changer for cars?

  • another solution (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Parsec ( 1702 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2003 @12:33PM (#7045115) Homepage Journal
    Would be to ban large vehicles from the city. Only allow one or two-person mini-vehicles in, while every SUV has to park on the border and take public transportation. It wouldn't be a politically popular move, but it would be space and fuel efficient.

    • Re:another solution (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Parsec ( 1702 )
      One way to ban large vehicles, would be to only fund / build parking for mini-vehicles. Sure you could drive around in your SUV, but there's nowhere to park the thing.

      • Wouldn't work. SUV-owning ingrates already squeeze their rolling death-traps into spaces plainly marked "compact".

        • So make new parking garages 5' tall. You'll get more vehicles in per vertical unit of space. And enforce already existing laws about parking over two spaces. Also, handicap vehicles would remain exempt and still guaranteed a minimum height for the first level of the garage (so they could fit their wheelchair lift equipped van somewhere).
      • One way to ban large vehicles, would be to only fund / build parking for mini-vehicles. Sure you could drive around in your SUV, but there's nowhere to park the thing.

        That's 100% backwards. Smaller vehicles mean smaller number of people in each vehicle mean more vehicles over all.

        Cities should encourage the use of large vehicles as long as folks are taking advantage of the high capacity. The extreme case is a city where everyone takes the bus versus a city where everyone drives a single-occupancy car.

    • I've always thought that at least on specific roads at specific times they should ban private cars. delivery truck, buses and cabs only.

      It would probably be more trouble to do that then its worth.

      • Re:another solution (Score:3, Informative)

        by Chilles ( 79797 )
        You have this in/around a lot of city centres here in the Netherlands.
        Shops, businesses and residents of a restricted area get a drive-in permit (for delivery) (and maybe one parking space) all public transport is allowed in (buses and cabs) and everybody else can park on the edge. Vehicles that are allowed in get a pass that unblocks the roads into and out of the system.
        solid metal blocks block the roads and can sink down when needed, controlled from some control centre that you can call and by some automa
        • You mention cabs being allowed in the public transportation lane. Well, how is a cab different from someone driving a normal mid sized car? Unless the cab is being shared amongst a few individuals, it doesn't seem any more efficient than a regular car. In fact, the cab might be more inefficient as it has to drive to pick up the person and then take them to wherever their destination may be. OTOH, the person who drives themself only has to drive from their starting point to their final destination. It's
          • in that they take up far less parking space per ride. Even if the cab is only carrying one rider at a time, it is carrying far more riders on an average day and it still takes only one space at the taxi stand.

            When the day's activities are over, the driver of the car has to get to the car and get it out of there. The person who rode the cab in can just as easily take the bus out.

            Don't get me wrong, I'm a dedicated driver and I can barely get along without a car. But I'm not about to sell buses and cabs sho

            • I think they ought to replace taxis at least with air cars, or electric vehicles. They are the perfect vehicles for it. They ought to at least all be hybrids in the city, they do a lot of stop and go, aggressive manouvering, and so on. They just need to be more powerful than the average hybrid.
      • Yeah, we have them in almost all British cities - they're called BUS LANES, not exactly hard to do.
        • its not hard, if your road is wide enough to do it. A lot of roads around here are just not that wide. And then of course there is the old city of Jerusalem, where the majority of "roads" are foot trafic only as there are too many stairs etc on them to do anything else.

          • the U.S. has a limitation of 2 lane roads? Make them one way, bus lane in one lane, normal traffic on the other (or just have bus lanes only like many roads)

      • Point A to point B (Score:2, Insightful)

        by randito ( 159822 )
        People get so obsessed with how they get from point A to point B, that sometimes they forget what point A and B are. If point A was designed properly, getting to point B would suddenly become much less important.

        In the debate over public vs private transport, people overlook WHY there is so much traffic in the first place.

        Low density suburbs with no commercial or industrial space cannot support mass transit. They barely have the tax base to support basic amenities like roads, police, sewers, water and

      • In some European cities (thinking of Rome in particular) there are entire sections (or times) that only taxis and delviery vehicles are allowed. People adapt because they have to.

        Not too great of a chance of anyone doing anything for the greater good on this side of the pond anytime soon, unfortunately. (Thanks, W.)

    • Well it would be better to take it one step further. On the border of the City have a Giant Parking lot and use public transit. In and out of the City. The only non-public viechicals allow are for shipping.

    • I grew up in a fairly progressive midwestern city and they tried something similar. They wanted to encourage people to use public transportation to go down to the center of town. That's where the state capital was and also the university (which had a student population of 35K-40K). To "encourage" everyone to take the bus downtown, they severely limited parking and made State Street a no-car street (buses, bikes and cops were the only things that could go down it).

      Anyhow, even with these measures, people

      • I don't mean to rag on you Parsec, but I think your ideas of encouraging transportation habits by engineering are naive.

        Understood, and taken into consideration. I'm just posting as an idea to be considered. People will drive even if it takes many times times as long to find a spot as walking. Part is probably learned helplessness, and just plain laziness. Engineering and social engineering are both required... and good luck on that!

        I don't think we should stop trying and experimenting to improve our

      • I found a scooter to be the ideal transport in Madison, but this was back in '88. I think the one think they could have done there to encourage mass transit and walking is beer. Allow beer on the buses, allow beer in hand while walking, and no-one in Madtown, Wisconsin would care about driving around. Except the legislature... no, wait... beer should work for them too...

    • Oh yes, my Suburban should be banned in cities. Now everyone who usually rides with me can divide up and take three small cars instead. Sounds like a great idea.

      • Wow, you actually commute? If you start counting the number of SUVs with passengers and the number of motorcycles with passengers, I'd bet the ratio is similar.

        But, I do agree with you... commuters should be taken into consideration... somehow.

        Though I have to ask... why can't you fit three people in a standard sized passenger car for travelling to the office?

      • Re:another solution (Score:2, Interesting)

        by jonm ( 13708 )
        Why don't you all take one bus instead?

        Was that so hard?

        • Perhaps because it takes an hour to get somewhere in a bus, especially if you need to transfer, when it takes 15 minutes to do the same by car?

          I live downtown in a major US city, and have begun driving because although we have fairly complete mass transit, it can take a damn long time to get around on the transit system, especially when the bus that's supposed to run every ten minutes somehow doesn't show up for 30 minutes at a stretch fairly regularly.

          Yes, I will get flamed for this, I'm bad, I'm destroy
          • I've found the wait for the initial pickup to be longer than any transfer time. If only they would institute web (cellphone) based tracking of the buses. Now there's a useful application! (and there's a market - even many bus users have cellphone's now)

        • Re:another solution (Score:2, Informative)

          by flikx ( 191915 )

          There's one problem with that. There are a lot of stairs and steep hills in my city, and my Suburban can crawl over more features while the bus takes the long way around. People don't realize how useful 4WD is in an urban environment.

    • SUV solution. [wreckedexotics.com]

  • Wuhoh (Score:3, Funny)

    by kurosawdust ( 654754 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2003 @12:36PM (#7045150)
    Oh christ - as if we didnt have enough trouble with people forgetting "Section 7 - Orange" when they go to the mall...

    "Honey where are we parked?"
    "space 3-16-47...or was that 3-17-46??"

  • Murphy (Score:2, Funny)

    by madkow ( 518822 )
    Welcome to the fully automated garage. Step awy from your car and rest assured that nothing can go wrong ... go wrong ... go wrong ...

  • Why they're used. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Chilles ( 79797 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2003 @12:44PM (#7045275)
    The main reason these things are used (in europe) is space.
    My dad is an expert on various car park solutions, mainly to let people "store" (park) their car somewhere at the edge of a city to use public transport to get to the centre (so called transferia). And he traveled around the world looking at how other cities/nations did this. He found that in europe solutions focus on using as little space as possible for as much cars as possible, which naturally led to this system. In the states however, the usual solution to this problem was taking a huge slab of land, covering it with some concrete or asphalt, throw a bus/subway/train station in the middle and call it a transferium. The US will get these things when empty land becomes as rare and expensive as it is now in most areas of europe.
    Which may never happen because malls (easily accessible by car) fulfill much of the functions for americans that city centres fulfill for europeans, so The US has fewer areas where lots of people need to go that are nearly impossible to get to by car. Maybe when people get fed-up with walking hundreds of metres across a huge car-park to the nearest mall entrance?
    • Kunstler is always a good authority on this kind of thing (he believes that American cities are wretched wastelands devoted to the worship of the automobile). Here is an article in which he compares how Europeans walk a lot more than Americans because they have the kind of cities that make walking possible (and enjoyable). Big and Blue in the USA [oriononline.org]

      Here is his website: http://www.kunstler.com/index.html [kunstler.com] His "Clusterfuck Nation" ongoing commentary is worthy of a bookmark, even from a right-winger like me.

      • Re:Why they're used. (Score:2, Insightful)

        by ckaminski ( 82854 )
        I gotta tell ya, living near Boston has been an interesting ride/walk the past couple weekends. I've been in and out of town hundreds and hundreds of times, but it wasn't until two weeks ago that I actually walked across town. From BU to the Aquarium, via Copley Square and the Commons. Bar hopping.

        Did it again last weekend for the Freedom Rally (aka Hemp Fest). This town is relatively easy to walk around in (not if you're in a hurry, I guess)... Even Chicago wasn't too bad on foot. An hour and a half
  • What happens when part of the system fails. For example the article mentioned cards that get scanned to identify which car it is storing and which car to retrieve when the driver returns. What if the card failed like some of my credit cards have in the past. Your now stuck in the middle of the city with your car being held hostage by an over grown vending machine. This isn't the only point of failure I see, but is the easies to illistrate.
  • ...that more SUV driving, republican voting, steak eating, three-putting meatheads won't want to trust their leased pride and joy to some automated parking garage.
  • There's no precise figures on what the operating costs of one of these would be and how it compares to a traditional garage. Looking at constuction costs alone, there's an additional 3 years to get a ROI with the 22K and 15K quotes for building the automated and ramped garages: If you look at a standard $225 a month charge for both scenarios. If you could prove that the long-term costs are less on these you might convince more people. The thing is though that there is very little ongoing maintenance to
    • The automated garage is more expensive monthly than the regular lots. I live right down the road. They even recently cut there prices to try and fill up the garage.

    1. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/21/realestate/21C OV.html?ex=1064721600&en=9dfde624d25e3a67&ei=5062& partner=YOUR_MOM ???
    2. Why go to all the trouble to bypass the registration system? The same people who do so have no problem signing up for a slashdot account.
    3. I have seen this exact technology in Mexico City. I hand the guy $1 (10 Pesos), and he hands over my car. It is much cheaper.

  • The oracle of the Internet (i.e., Google) indicates that Haag used illegal employment methods in Germany [amazing.com] and has been involved in setting up front groups [eskimo.com] for Scientology [xenu.net]. Gee, I wonder if the parking is done not by robots at all but by body thetans [holysmoke.org].

  • First there is "Like something out of the Jetsons"

    then it says "Europe and Asia have several already."

    So Europe and Asia are far ahead in time, with cool futuristic things and the US is in the Stone Age still?
  • I think this explains the true origins of the Cube.. It was a prototype for these parking garages!

  • Jetsons??? (Score:1, Insightful)

    by ViolentGreen ( 704134 )
    George Jetson didn't need to park his car (ship/whatever.) It was his briefcase if I remember correctly. Seriuosly though, some parking facilities in Manhattan have something similar. The only real problem is that it is not automated and the operators aren't too fluent in English. I can't recall how long we had to wait to receive our car but it wasn't anything too outrageous. I just remember it because it was something I had never even considered. I really can't see the wait being too much of a proble
  • In the Thunderbirds episode "Move and you're dead" aired 10th Feb '66 Alan Tracy parks his car in the 'Parola Sands' automated car park.

    Sad (me) but true...

  • I knew I remembered reading about this somewhere back in my mis-spent youth. Turns out that way back in July '76, MAD Magazine's Al Jaffee did a piece on "MAD's Solutions to Big City Parking Problems [collectmad.com]", which included several variations on this idea.

    Concepts such as the "Curbside Multi-Level Parking Elevator Facility" and "Multi-Leveled Lazy Susan High Speed Parking Facility" show that once again, the usual gang of idiots leads the way. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find a scan of the piece, just t
  • I lived in an apartment in Japan that used a system like this. One day, after some adverse weather conditions, the power to the building was out.

    I'll never forget the pointless small talk i had with 4 Japanese businessmen standing around in front of the parking structure full of working cars and dead car delivery systems, unable to get their cars out and go to work, and trying to remember how the salesmen had convinced them that cars would be more convenient than the train.

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