Hi All,

 

Partner sent this to me. I can't see this happining to my car without a few Valiums. ;-) Bear hugz to all.

 

Jim S.

 

 

Munich parking garage

 

This  is   incredible! Can you imagine how all this operates?? How do they lock

each  car in its cubicle for safety?   WHO  CARES? NO ONE IN THEIR RIGHT MIND

COULD  GET IN THERE.

 

Talk about  German efficiency! The two photos below were taken at a new parking

garage in  Munich. The actual  space that the facility occupies is approximately

only 20% of a comparable  facility with the traditional design that is used

primarily in the  US. Not only  is the German structure less expensive to build,

but vehicles are also  "retrieved" in less time and without the potential of

being damaged by an  attendant.

 

 

 

 

Very cool...I believe that may be the VW factory/museum in Dresden...

 

http://www.caranddriver.com/features/7207/virtual-tour-of-vws-transparent-factory-page14.html

 

http://www.metropolismag.com/html/content_1202/dre/index.html

Yeah, but what happens if your car is "trapped" by faulty machinery?

Now that's a cool parking garage.

They actually have one of these in D.C. and one in New York, I think.

 

Here's the website for one company that installs these units:

http://www.roboticparking.com/home_broadband.php

 

 

^they do in ny. i know of at least one visible automatic garage downtown on fulton street by the seaport. they are all over the place along the riviera too, esp in italy. nothing anywhere near on that order tho.....wow, that one is just amazing.

i found that this 9/21/2003 nytimes article has lots 'o info about this style of garages.

 

there is one in hoboken that holds 324 cars, they said it would only hold 95 if traditionally ramped instead of fully automated. the dc version is in the summit grand parc apt building by the white house and holds 74 cars.

 

link:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9905E1DB123AF932A1575AC0A9659C8B63&sec=&pagewanted=1

 

Yeah, but what happens if your car is "trapped" by faulty machinery?

 

I've seen similar devices used for storage and retrieval of pallets of merchandise in factories and warehouses, and every once in a while a pallet gets dumped. I wonder if that ever happens with a car. :-o

Very cool!

 

Snopes has some info about these particular pictues...

http://www.snopes.com/photos/automobiles/parkade.asp

Why has the US been ignoring this technology for the most part.  More parking spaces in less space, quicker retrieval of car, less risk (damage, theft, etc).  I would love to have little service garages on the sides of bldgs instead of massive garages that kill life on the block they exist.  This is my favorite option:

 

 

This is the kind of thing Kassouf said he wants for his "proposed" high-rise condos in downtown Cleveland.

Cincinnati was actually looking at this type of technology for a few sites downtown that were going to hold city garages, only one of the three sites has been built so far (the garage that is the base for the Neyer? condo tower maybe?  The other sites are very small and would not work well as traditional garages.

 

Also, the old Carew Tower garage was automated, and used a similar, but much older elevator technology.

And here's how it's powered:

now they are saying these garages are getting to be popular apt building amenities:

 

 

 

An Urban Parking Perk: The Automated Garage

Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times

 

An automated parking garage is being built at a luxury condo at 123 Baxter Street, between Hester and Canal Streets in Lower Manhattan.

 

 

By C. J. HUGHES

Published: December 6, 2006

 

For decades, Italy, Germany and Japan have been developing automated garages in which cars are not driven to parking spaces but instead are lifted by computerized machines and stowed in compact berths. Such designs greatly increase the number of vehicles that a garage can hold.

 

 

In an automated garage, cars are lifted by computerized machines and stowed in compact berths.

 

 

The United States has been slow to come around to automated garages, however, largely because of fears that the technology is not reliable enough.

 

One of the first automated garages in the New York area — designed by Robotic Parking Systems of Clearwater, Fla., and opened in 2002 in Hoboken, N.J. — took too long to retrieve cars, drivers said, and even dropped a few. Robotic Parking said the problems in Hoboken had been fixed, and it was now in talks to build automated garages at 30 sites in the New York City area, according to Jeffrey Faria, a company spokesman.

 

Other developers seem to be thinking along the same lines in New York, as parking a car the old-fashioned way becomes more difficult because traditional surface parking lots are being gobbled up as sites for new buildings, according to developers, brokers and land-use experts.

 

Some luxury-condo developers are offering in-house automatic garages as a sales incentive for new residents, on a par with concierge service or hotel-pool passes.

 

“There’s no question that with parking, the development becomes that much more valuable; for the buyer, it’s an absolute plus,” said Arthur Stadig, a vice president in the Boston office of Walker Parking Consultants, whose clients include developers of condos, office buildings and stores.

 

One pioneer is the seven-story luxury condo rising at 123 Baxter Street, between Hester and Canal Streets in Lower Manhattan. It will have 24 units, ranging in size from 1,200-square-foot one-bedrooms to 4,800-square-foot four-bedrooms, according to Perry Finkelman, chief executive of the American Development Group, the project’s developer.

 

Each apartment, he said, will be guaranteed at least one parking space in the basement garage, which will fit 68 cars. The spots will be leased for $550 a month, Mr. Finkelman said.

 

The spaces cost about $40,000 each to build on average, compared with $30,000 for a space in a typical underground parking lot, although those figures can be considerably higher, depending on how deep the builder has to dig and what is encountered along the way.

 

Any spaces in the garage that are not rented by residents will be available to the public on a daily or monthly basis, said Mr. Finkelman, who owned the 100-space parking lot that formerly occupied the site.

 

Although constructing the condo meant a net loss of about 30 parking spaces, higher rates on the public portion will help to guarantee a revenue stream comparable to what the old lot provided, he said. The old lot charged $20 a day; the new one will charge $30, or $550 a month, the same rate as for residents.

 

“And there will be no more screeching tires and dents and things going missing,” said Mr. Finkelman, referring to an attendant-based system.

 

The absence of garage workers, though, may take some getting used to, said Ari Milstein, director of planning for Automotion Parking Systems, based in West Hempstead, N.Y., which created the garage’s technology. A driver drops off a car in one of two bays, grabs a receipt from a kiosk and pays at the same kiosk later on to retrieve the vehicle.

 

“When people first started using A.T.M.’s, they were uncomfortable with them,” Mr. Milstein said. “The more they use this, the more they will come to appreciate it over the conventional way.”

 

In the meantime, he is licensing his technology to Mr. Finkelman for another project: the Sochi, a 28-story luxury condo in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, where an automated garage will offer parking for 130 cars in a back-of-the-building above-ground space that would otherwise have a capacity for half that, Mr. Milstein said.

 

An automated garage is also a major selling point for One York Street, a 14-story luxury condo between St. John’s Lane and West Broadway in Lower Manhattan, which will break ground next summer.

 

When completed, it will have 40 residences, ranging in size from 1,000-square-foot studios to 3,200-square-foot three-bedrooms. Underneath, an automated garage will be able to fit about 40 cars, one per unit, according to Stanley Perelman, the managing principal of Jani Real Estate, the project’s developer.

 

Complicated excavation work means each space will cost about $130,000 to build, according to Mr. Perelman, who will sell them to tenants for $175,000 for a standard-size car or $200,000 for a sport utility vehicle. Though the garage will require maintenance and insurance, those expenses will still be lower than paying attendants’ salaries, he said.

 

Another bonus of the technology, designed by Park Plus, based in Wallington, N.J., is that it allows Mr. Perelman to increase the garage’s capacity without increasing its size, which is limited by the zoning.

 

Still, he praises it as a cutting-edge amenity. “Virtually every parking lot in the immediate vicinity has been sold and will be developed on,” Mr. Perelman said. “Once people see how well it works, you will see more and more developers turning to it.”

 

What flies in New York does not necessarily play in other cities, however; many municipal codes do not allow automated parking, so lengthy hearings are often required.

 

This is a reason the introduction of the technology in the United States has taken so long, said Lee Lazarus, president of A.P.T. Parking Technologies, based in Manhattan.

 

A.P.T. said it was negotiating to build automated garages in five cities nationwide, including one in New York. Mr. Lazarus would not disclose details because of confidentiality agreements, he said.

 

“These garages are clearly becoming a useful real-estate development tool,” he said.

 

 

There's automated garage in downtown Detroit that is pretty nice.  It occupies a very narrow footprint, and the exterior is made to look like an actual building (with windows) since you don't have to worry about too much exhaust, other than from the machinery itself.

here's some news that the new ny auto garage in chinatown is about to open:

 

 

Jan 30, 7:46 AM EST

 

 

Robot Parking Garage to Open in New York

 

By PETER SVENSSON

AP Technology Writer

 

AP Photo/Kathy Willens

A vehicle is lowered through the floor into an automated parking garage in New York, Wednesday, Jan. 24, 2007. The parking garage is the first of its kind in the United States. (AP Photo/Kathy Willens)

 

 

NEW YORK (AP) -- Would you trust a robot to park your car? The question will confront New Yorkers in February as the city's first robotic parking opens in Chinatown. The technology has had a good track record overseas, but the only other public robotic garage in the United States has been troublesome, dropping vehicles and trapping cars because of technical glitches.

 

Nonetheless, the developers of the Chinatown garage are confident with the technology and are counting on it to squeeze 67 cars in an apartment-building basement that would otherwise fit only 24, accomplished by removing a ramp and maneuver space normally required.

 

A humanoid robot valet won't be stepping into your car to drive it.

 

Rather, the garage itself does the parking. The driver stops the car on a pallet and gets out. The pallet is then lowered into the innards of the garage, and transported to a vacant parking space by a computer-controlled contraption similar to an elevator that also runs sideways.

 

There is no human supervision, but an attendant will be on hand to accept cash and explain the system to baffled humans.

 

Parking rates will be competitive - about $400 monthly or $25 per day, according to Ari Milstein, the director of planning for Automotion Parking Systems, the U.S. subsidiary of Germany's Stolzer Parkhaus, which has built automated garages in several countries overseas and in the United States for residents of a Washington, D.C., apartment building.

 

Another company had built the only other public robotic garage in the United States, the one with a checkered past.

 

Built in 2002 across the river in Hoboken, N.J., with 314 spaces for monthly rentals only, the garage dropped an unoccupied Cadillac Deville six floors in 2004 and a Jeep four stories the following year. Early last year, a malfunction that went unrepaired for 26 hours trapped cars inside.

 

This summer, the city of Hoboken tried to wrest control of the garage from its builder, Robotic Parking Systems Inc. of Clearwater, Fla., and an ensuing court battle shut it down for two weeks, trapping some cars inside. The garage is closed until Thursday as the city replaces the controlling software, city spokesman Bill Campbell said.

 

Dennis Clarke, the chief operating officer at Robotic Parking, acknowledged the operational problems, but said the garage has operated with "99.99 percent efficiency." He called the 26-hour outage a freak incident, where two redundant sensors failed at the same time and a maintenance crew failed to follow company policy in not repairing them right away.

 

The company's current generation of garages is much improved, Clarke added.

 

"Software-wise, machinery-wise, everything that has ever given us a problem has been designed out of the system," Clarke said.

 

Automotion's Milstein said that in the 11 years Stolzer Parkhaus has built robotic garages, only one car has been damaged, in an incident involving a half-set parking brake. Even that loophole has now been eliminated with the addition of an additional sensor, he said.

 

"It is a complete virtual impossibility that damage can occur," he said.

 

If the garage lives up to that claim, it would certainly be a safety record unheard of for traditional garages, where not only cars but people get hurt and even killed. Even the Hoboken garage may not look like a disaster by comparison, though it's rare for a conventional garage not to give your car back.

 

The two loading bays in the Chinatown garage are outfitted with enough laser and radar sensors to make Fort Knox jealous. They sense if the car fits on the pallet (it's large enough for medium-sized SUVs) and look for movement to determine whether the driver and passenger have left the car. When the car is properly parked on the pallet, the driver is told to exit the car and leave the bay, and a door closes behind him or her before the pallet descends into the garage.

 

When the driver comes back for the car, the underground system goes into motion to retrieve it. Because it parks cars two deep in some slots, it sometimes needs to shuffle cars around to retrieve others. The software figures all that out.

 

In a touch worthy of Inspector Gadget, an underground turntable turns the car around before it's lifted to the surface, ensuring that it's returned facing out into the driveway, eliminating any need to back out of the garage.

 

Clarke at Robotic Parking Systems said demand for robotic parking is booming in the country after long lagging behind other developed countries.

 

The company just finished shipping a 900-car garage to Dubai and signed a deal for a 1,200-car garage for the United Arab Emirates, is working on several U.S. projects, including one 229-car garage at the Hollywood Grande resort in Florida.

 

"Demand is such that they're really stacking up on us," Clarke said. "What seems to have happened is that the developers have been wanting this for a long time, but the architects have been lagging behind. Architects use the same plans over and over, particularly when it comes to parking in a garage."

 

---

 

On the Net:

 

http://www.automotionparking.com

 

http://www.robopark.com

 

 

 

I still think its a pretty cool concept...glad to see it possibly catching on in the states!

the garage dropped an unoccupied Cadillac Deville six floors in 2004 and a Jeep four stories the following year.

 

Holy crap!

the garage dropped an unoccupied Cadillac Deville six floors in 2004 and a Jeep four stories the following year.

 

Holy crap!

 

what? that aint bad for new jersey - lol!

 

 

"There is no human supervision, but an attendant will be on hand to accept cash and explain the system to baffled humans."

 

This quote makes me laugh for some reason.

 

 

 

 

"There is no human supervision, but an attendant will be on hand to accept cash and explain the system to baffled humans."

 

This quote makes me laugh for some reason.

 

 

Silly human...

i saw more pics of it:

 

 

Here are some exterior views of the Volkswagen facility in Dresden (not Munich), which originated this thread:

 

http://www.pbase.com/archetype/image/72013449

http://www.pbase.com/archetype/image/72013447

 

 

^wow what an awesome factory -- who says they dont put care into factory buildings anymore.

 

 

here are some more graphics and links on the new enrique norton auto parking apt building in manhattan:

 

 

 

Norten's 1 York Update #3: Parking in Paradise

 

Friday, February 2, 2007, by ROK88

 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

 

 

Time for our final stop this week at architect Enrique Norten's 1 York in Tribeca. We've made note of the automated parking slated for 1 York before, but given that space-agey and high-tech parking is all the rage for new Manhattan developments, here's a closer look. Via the 1 York website, parking one's car will be the least of your worries here; no wonder they had to tear down most of the old building on that site. After all, where else in NYC can you get your car back in only 90 seconds?

 

The only question is: Do you have to tip the key card scanning thing-a-ma-jiggy? Not to worry. Have a safe trip! And be sure to keep your eyes on the road.

 

 

 

 

 

· HoodWatch Tidbits: Park Your Pretend Car at 1 York [Curbed]

· Norten's 1 York Update #1: A Mere Shell [Curbed]

· Norten's 1 York Update #2: Pool Party! [Curbed]

 

 

Posted in Manhattan: Tribeca & Downtown, Real Estate Development, Real Estate Miscellany, Urban Planning

 

http://www.curbed.com/archives/2007/02/02/nortens_1_york_update_3_parking_in_paradise.php

 

 

 

 

Here are some exterior views of the Volkswagen facility in Dresden (not Munich), which originated this thread:

 

http://www.pbase.com/archetype/image/72013449

http://www.pbase.com/archetype/image/72013447

 

Bauhaus in tha house!

From the New York Times:

 

Parking as a Destination

By PHIL PATTON

 

IT was just a patch of black asphalt, but for the weary Manhattan motorist orbiting the narrow streets of Chinatown, it glimmered like an oasis in the Sahara.

 

For years, Michael Schneeweiss of MGS Parking Management presided over that patch, dispatching attendants to greet parkers so happy to find a spot that they almost forgot to grumble about the rates.

 

But now the lot is gone. Reversing Joni Mitchell’s lyrics, the developers pulled up a parking lot and put in a paradise — a luxury condo development at 123 Baxter Street whose amenities include Internet-capable refrigerators.

 

The 100 parking spaces that Mr. Schneeweiss managed have been replaced, below the 24 condos, by 74 spots in New York City’s first automated parking garage. Two dozen spaces will be reserved for apartment owners. Starting Thursday, the rest will be open to the public — first for monthly lessees and, come spring, for drive-ins.

 

The project is the work of AutoMotion Parking Systems, the American subsidiary of Stolzer Parkhaus of Strassburg, Germany. Stolzer Parkhaus has built 28 automated garages in 11 countries since its first, in Kronach, Germany, in 1996. The software and hardware that moves the cars around in the garages were adapted from systems that store materials in warehouses.

 

“This is the future,” Mr. Schneeweiss said during a recent tour of the Chinatown garage, shaking his head as if he did not quite believe it yet.

 

But the future is coming on fast in cities like New York, where shiny towers are rising over what had long been parking lots. “There is a proliferation of high-rise condo construction in major urban areas,” said Donald R. Monahan, vice president of Walker Parking Consultants in Greenwood Village, Colo., who follows innovations in the business closely. “Usually these have small footprints that do not offer enough room for traditional garages.”

 

Not only are developers looking at automated garages, city planners and architects are discussing new ideas to manage automobiles, even when stationary. Urban theorists and policy makers are increasingly looking at the effects of parking on traffic, development, pollution and energy efficiency. Smart parking could save energy.

 

Mr. Schneeweiss, a parking industry veteran who wears a jaunty racing cap, and Ari Milstein, planning director for AutoMotion, showed off the Baxter Street garage. A driver pulls off the street into a room roughly the size of a one-car garage attached to a house. The car rests on a large pallet, a traylike area with shallow troughs for the wheels.

 

“Lasers check that the car is aligned,” Mr. Milstein said, and determines that it is not one of the trucks or S.U.V.’s too big for the garage. The driver locks the car, takes the keys and picks up an electronic card from a nearby machine. A large door closes behind the car; motion detectors ensure that no children or pets are left behind.

 

Then the pallet holding the car slides below ground level, into two subterranean floors of storage.

 

“It’s simple — park, swipe and leave,” Mr. Milstein said.

 

The returning driver pays — using a credit card at a machine, or handing cash to the human “parking concierge” in a booth. The machinery retrieves the pallet holding the car, which rises to ground level, pointing toward the exit. You unlock the doors and drive away.

 

“You get your car in under three minutes,” Mr. Milstein promises. “It’s as easy as an A.T.M. or E-ZPass.” Rates will be comparable to conventional parking in Manhattan, he said, about $400 a month.

 

For the driver, the advantages of an automated system go beyond convenience and speed. The car remains untouched and unopened, and with the parking area ostensibly off limits to people, valuables are safe inside. Assuming the mechanized parts are functioning right, the car avoids potential scrapes and bumps. Seats and mirrors remain as you left them; the radio will still be tuned to, say, Lite FM. There is no tipping.

 

“You can even go shopping,” Mr. Milstein said, “bring things back to your car, lock them in the trunk and go on shopping.”

 

For the developer, automated garages offer cost advantages in construction and operation. By omitting ramps and walkways, about twice as many cars can be tucked into the space. Labor and insurance costs are lower, and getting cars in and out is faster.

 

Michael Stolzer, dispatched from Stolzer Parkhaus in Germany to help set up the new garage, showed off the computerized control area and the storage floors. The cars on their pallets can be stacked more tightly than those in a traditional garage; clearance in the storage cubicles is only roof-high, not human-head high.

 

The design recalls the way bakeries stack goods on racks: car cakes on trays.

 

AutoMotion has built only one previous project in the United States, a 74-space automated garage at the Summit Grand Parc, a luxury residential building in Washington, not far from the White House. But the company has three more projects under way in the New York area, Mr. Milstein said.

 

Automated garages are much more common in Europe and Asia, said John Van Horn, editor and publisher of Parking Today, a magazine, Web site and blog based in Los Angeles. “There are thousands of them in Europe,” he said. “There is one on practically every corner in Japan. In the U.S., it has mostly been a matter of European technology licensed to people who don’t understand the parking industry.”

 

But the Baxter Street project is different, said Mr. Van Horn, who visited the site this month. “With the technology and the footprint there, it should be viable,” he said. There are economic incentives: a traditional garage on the site could have held only 24 cars, too few to be feasible. And, he noted, AutoMotion is affiliated with one of the building’s developers, the American Development Group.

 

An earlier and much publicized automated project in Hoboken helped to raise doubts about such operations. Opened in 2002, the Garden Street garage was designed by Robotic Parking Systems of Clearwater, Fla. In 2004, a Cadillac dropped several floors in the garage and a Jeep suffered a similar fate a year later. Jeff Faria, a spokesman for Robotic Parking, said the problems resulted from factors other than the garage’s equipment.

 

Mr. Van Horn said publicity about the Hoboken garage made developers wary of such projects.

 

Parking is a $26 billion industry, according to the International Parking Institute in Fredericksburg, Va. The institute says there are about 40,000 parking garages and other facilities with 105 million spaces.

 

In “Park It! NYC 2007 ” (Park It! Guides) Margot J. Tohn says there are 1,110 off-street parking garages and lots in Manhattan, with 104,000 spaces.

 

That, most motorists would say, is not enough. According to surveys done by the National Parking Association, a trade organization based in Washington, the average cost of building a parking spot averages about $14,000 nationally and about $18,000 in the New York area.

 

Donald C. Shoup, an urban planning professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, is an advocate of reform of zoning and building code requirements for off-street parking. In his book, “The High Cost of Free Parking” (American Planning Association), he contends that local regulations have distorted the shape of cities by subsidizing the automobile and penalizing people without cars, who tend to be less affluent. He has been embraced by the new urbanists and those who advocate “congestion pricing” tolls on city streets and highways.

 

Information technology could make parking easier and more efficient. At many airports and on the edges of some European cities, overhead digital signs display information about available spaces in parking decks. Various plans have been offered for finding and reserving parking spots by mobile phone or the Internet.

 

Professor Shoup argues for market-based parking, with rates that vary by the time of day or the season. Some planners advocate a high-tech, socially networked system of pricing — a spot market for parking spots. One start-up company exploring a system to reserve and rent spots is SpotScout (spotscout.com).

 

Proponents of automated parking like to compare their garages with vending machines. Long frustrated by the homeliness of traditional decks — dim places suitable for mob executions or reporters’ meetings with Deep Throats — architects have taken inspiration from the vending machine to reimagine future garages.

 

In Europe, Smart dealerships display stacks of the lovable little cars in glass structures, as attractive as snacks. At Volkswagen’s Autostadt customer center in Wolfsburg, Germany, where many buyers pick up their new cars, two silolike glass towers hold cars fresh from the factory. These are robotically retrieved by a central elevator and delivered to the customers waiting below, adding drama to the handover of the keys.

 

Inspired by Pez candy dispensers, Keith Moskow, of Moskow Architects in Boston, has sketched a concept for a see-through automated garage for car-sharing services like Zipcar. A German company, CarLoft (carloft.de), is building an apartment tower in Berlin that lets residents park their cars on their balconies. A New York architect, Annabelle Selldorf, has offered a similar vision for a Manhattan building with elevators that would let tenants drive their cars into garages next to their high-rise apartments.

 

The Smart Cities project of the Media Lab of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has suggested a variety of possible visions of future parking. Smart parking places could signal their availability electronically to passing motorists. Ryan Chin, Mitchell Joachim and other researchers at the Media Lab propose to redesign vehicles to make them easier to park — the spatial demands of parking could be reduced by six to eight times, they argue, with small cars that nest together like grocery carts.

 

 

Carlyle's Watch, a condo development on 3rd and Gay in Columbus, is using one of these systems.  I just saw it a few weeks ago.

 

http://carlyleswatch.com/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=47&Itemid=50

 

You just pull up into the stall, punch in your code, and your car either goes up or down.  Each parking stall holds three cars.

^ wow now that is a really cool looking new apt building. seems to lack ground level retail or pedestrian interaction from the renderings, but otherwise looks sharp. they got the automatic-parking too, a nice perk.

Oh nice.

 

They had a nice article about a similar system, all computerized, in Florida but I can't find the article.

 

Someone mentioned about parking garages killing life. Well, that is pretty much true, but I can't find anything uglier than when a parking garage is blantingly obvious _above_ ground but below the actual "building".

 

 

It's my building too :P