Posted on 07/08/2007 2:10:26 AM PDT by IsraelBeach
Automated Parking Garage Solutions Hold Key To Urban Development
By Carole Fradette
Israel News Agency
Hoboken, New Jersey ----July 8....... The recent spike in oil prices and growing concern for the environment has sparked renewed interest in mixed-use urban development.
Today's leading urban planners and downtown developers are rethinking their allegiance to single-use zoning practices and focusing on building communities in order to create neighborhoods in which people can live, socialize, shop, and perhaps even work - all within a comfortable walking distance.
While large suburban yards were recently the sought-after American ideal, today, high gas and petrol prices make living close to friends, neighbors, social activities, and public transportation more attractive than suburban scrawl. High-density living naturally reduces household gasoline usage without crimping personal freedom or creating feelings of undue sacrifice.
The Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) is a multidisciplinary organization in which urban planners, real estate developers, architects, builders, suppliers and others work together to solve land use problems with a heavy emphasis toward mixed use developments. CNU President and CEO John Norquist states that high-rise cities like Philadelphia and New York rarely come to mind as models of environmentalism, but they should. He backs this up by citing a report prepared for New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's green blueprint, PlaNYC, showing that New Yorkers generate, on average, 7.1 metric tons of greenhouse gases a year, two-thirds less than the average 24.5 metric tons generated by most Americans.
The green building movement is also growing in popularity among many urban builders and developers. For a building to qualify as green, it must meet certain standards for design, construction, and operation such as those set forth by the nationally accepted Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System. Some of the things that help qualify a building as "green" in the US, Europe, the Middle-East and Asia are the use of natural light, energy-efficiency, water savings, building materials, and indoor environmental quality. Renovation projects are also subject to reuse of a certain percentage of the original construction material, helping the environment by creating less waste than a traditional "tear down and build" project.
While many cities and towns from New York, Chicago and Hoboken to London, Paris and Tel Aviv are moving forward with multi-use buildings and redevelopment of their downtowns, some projects are being held up because of the need for parking space.
Local parking regulations require building developers to provide a certain number of parking spaces per "X" square feet of office, commercial or residential space, as even environmentally conscious residents of high-density communities want to be able to access their cars on the weekends and other key times.
In areas such as Los Angeles, the adaptive reuse movement to renovate blighted historic buildings virtually ground to a halt because of lack of parking. Architect Wade Killefer, founding partner of Killefer Flammang Architects, says that lack of parking is keeping some 140 sites in Los Angeles from being converted into housing, parks and other space.
Automated parking garages are one the creative solutions being proposed to address these problems.
Automated parking garages utilize computer-controlled motorized vehicles such as lifts, conveyors and shuttles to transport passenger cars from the arrival level to a parking space and vice versa, without human assistance. Customers simply drive into a friendly entry bay and stop, exit and lock their car. Upon return, the automated parking garage system retrieves the car and quickly delivers it to the driver in a convenient exit-facing position.
Automated parking garages have captured the attention of building and real estate developers, architects, builders and municipalities, not because of their cool, futuristic robotics features, but because of their space-saving efficiencies. Automated parking garages can hold two to three times the number of cars as traditional ramp-style parking garages of the same volume. This enables building developers in the US, Europe, South America, Middle-East and Asia to meet their parking requirements in less space and thus be able to profit from more housing, office and or commercial units than they would have with a traditional ramp-access garage.
Urban planners and architects in the US, England, Canada, Spain, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Japan, China and dozens of other nations also like the idea because it gives them more design flexibility and enables facades to match the architects vision, and not stand out as neighborhood eyesores.
The idea of automated parking garage solutions has also caught on among green building movements because cars and vans are parked with their engines off, significantly reducing exhaust emissions and the problem of carbon monoxide and other pollutants creeping into the surrounding office, residential and retail space.
”The amount of land consumed by conventional parking garages in proportion to the habitable space of the buildings they serve is enormous,” says architect and CNU member, Neal Payton, of Torti Gallas and Partners. “For that reason, we have a number of clients planning major urban projects utilizing robotic parking, primarily to save land and to make the projects financially feasible.”
Having exhibited at the International Parking Institute's annual conference and expo held in Tampa, Florida in May, Rafi Stoffman, VP Sales and Marketing for Unitronics, a leading provider of automated parking solutions in the U.S., reports, "Parking is a growing problem in almost every city in the US and around the world. The search for parking places a burden on city streets and adversely affects the environment and quality of life," says Stoffman.
The Unitronics automated parking garage solutions executive adds: "The good news is that the real estate, building and parking industries are working together to help alleviate this problem. The high number of visitors to our booth and interest in our new generation Automated Parking Solutions are proof that the North American market is taking off, and we're excited to play a key role in this movement."
Automated parking provides customers with a valet-parking like experience that is fast, safe and in many cases, less expensive or equal to regular parking solutions. The automated car retrieval process can take between one to three minutes depending on the size of the system and the location of the car.
Additional advantages include the fact that customers no longer have to waste time driving around looking for a parking space or trying to remember where they parked their car upon return. They also benefit from reduced risks of damage and theft and increased personal security since the actual parking area is not accessible to the public.
Creative parking solutions can go a long way towards making our world a cleaner and nicer place to live.
As they said to Jeb Clampet, “move away from there and get a life”
Any living arrangement is A-OK as long as you don't have a yard for your kid.
These guys ought to have to debate Anna Quindlen. She and her hubby were happy Noo Yokk cosmopolites (theater, museums, those famous 2 a.m. bagels) until they started to talk about having kids. Priorities changed dramatically, and she began to notice -- hello -- such urban charms as discarded hypodermics in alleys. Off to suburbia went they.
Besides, what kind of parent would want his kid to grow up in hotels and turn into Al Gore?
Or Lenny Bernstein?
The automatic parking sounds great -- until you reflect that, in an emergency such as, oh, a giant urban fire or power failure, you can't retrieve your car to load it up with valuables and get the hell out of Dodge City. You're stuck, screwed. Good luck.
Urbanism is all about, you have to put up with a lot less for your money. No wonder property owners love it. (And they live out in Westchester County.)
High gas prices will not cause urbanization. Sorry, but you will never see the kind of living that they do here in Europe in North America. We have too much land in North America for that and people want to get out of the city.
You're joking, I hope? If there is a major incident in a dense urban area, you're stuck without a vehicle anyway due to the immediate gridlock that accompanies the event.
Thing is, if there's a large urban fire, the fire suppression systems built into such automated garages would mean it much more likely that your car would be there at the end of the emergency.
I’m suspect of the suggestion that the prices are similar, but when you take into account property costs, it is quite possible that they are indeed almost on par with traditional parking structures. The funny thing is that when I was reading the article, I was going, gosh, why would I want to use these damn things, three minutes to get my car? Then I realized I’d spend more than that time driving to my space, as well as taking elevators or stairs to and from my car, as well as driving out again and waiting in my car to pay my parking fee.
Why do city planners depend so much on human engineering to get things done? Remember when they told us that carpool (HOV - Diamond) lanes would reduce traffic?
What happens when there is a mechanical failure during morning or afternoon rush hour? Things break.
Come on, no way 1200 unless he parks at the Ritz Carlton at the daily rate or he has an apartment where the elevator brings his car to him. Maybe half that in upper class neighborhoods.
Oh, oh! No way! What's going to happen if one of those communities turns out to be all white? Will there be forced busing? Low income housing required?
More communist ideals.
These are already common in Japan, and seem to work well from the experiences I had while there. Interestingly enough they have similar contraptions for bicycles in which you push your bike in and it disappears underground. I believe the systems have been in use for years and I would think should be pretty reliable by now. I’m amazed they’re not already more common in US.
In 1995 I went to visit a friend in the Upper East Side (~70th Street) and the 24hr parking rate in the building was $38. That was twice the resident rate, because even though I lived in NY State, I did not have a NYC sticker on my car, just the NY one. Found it was an insurance coverage restriction (ripoff!) for NYC buildings. The parking garage three streets over charged $26. Plus tax.
$1200 is realistic for a top spot. Recall there’s an 18.25% tax on parking, plus upcharges for priority spots, “don’t dent me” bribes to attendants, etc.
I use a semi automated parking garage in NYC because my customer has an account with the garage. I walk in and the attendant is fiddling with the hydraulic lines on the car lift, and cursing how it’s in bad shape. I specifically tell the other attendant retrieving my car to put my car on their other lift to get it back to street level.
He puts it on the sketchy lift, and the hydraulic line snaps between floors. Safety break on lift stops a freefall descent (always heart stopping to watch your car falling at 20mph straight down in front of you). My car was stuck for 8 hours on a Tuesday evening. Freezing cold and I had left my jacket in the car. God damn nightmare getting home that day.
There are however new condos being built on the West Side that have private car elevators and parking spaces, on your floor, directly in front of your front door. Those are some cool condos. At about $3500/sf though. Supposedly being built by the heirs of the Monaco crown or something like that.
Like I said, businessmen and plutocrats design cities for their own ends -- and then go live out in the 'burbs to escape the consequences they conjure for others.
Whose hydraulics, like the garage you describe, will go nasty after a while and stay that way to help someone stay cash-flow positive.
Like I said.
Street level parking is bad too:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVZBq1naTNY
and
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQs5iussTJ8
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