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.
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?
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.