There’s a part of my city that I genuinely hate entering.
It’s popular for its bars and restaurants, has a rich nightlife with plenty of concerts, and it’s just a hair outside of walking distance from the major league sports stadiums.
My problem with this part of town stems from the fact that I have to drive to get there, and parking is, to put it lightly, a nightmare.
Street parking is severely limited even on the slower days of the week, and on evenings and weekends, street parking is nonexistent. The few parking garages are costly, inconveniently located, and fill up quickly.
Anytime I’m invited to go somewhere in this part of town, I have to find a really good reason to go.
When my wife and I were in Germany recently, we saw something in Munich that instantly made me think of that part of our city I hate.
It looked like a car wash, except when cars pulled in, the driver got out, and the car was lowered through a giant trapdoor in the ground.
Under the street, there is a parking structure capable of holding 284 cars. The machine, called the Wöhr Multiparker 740, automatically places cars into their own unique slots in vertical racks under the street.
It’s essentially a giant vending machine for parking cars.
Otto Wöhr GmbH has built about 20 of these parking structures across the globe. In addition to the ones it’s built in its home country of Germany, it has constructed unique garages in Singapore, Israel, Turkey, India, and a dozen other countries, including the United States.
Wöhr is one of the companies that is taking automated parking into the age of robots.
History Repeats
You see, the idea of automatic parking systems has existed as long as cars have. The first automated parking system on record was opened in 1905 in Paris.
Parking garages already existed, but architect Auguste Perret, a wizard with concrete structures, built a parking garage at 51 Rue de Ponthieu that included elevators, turntables, and valets who would manipulate the machines and park the cars.
The concept is older than any of us. Automated, mechanized underground parking was conceived in the late 1920s and brought into reality in the 1930s.
Self-parking, however, took over because it was cheaper to build ramp garages and easier to maintain them. With a single person manning a gate, several hundred cars could self-park in a garage at a time. It means less responsibility on the part of the garage owner and more money in the coffers.
But these types of structures don’t aggressively solve the problem of limited space.
Since 2002, computerized, robotic parking garages have been popping up across the United States. They don’t require attendants, and they can intelligently compensate for limited space. Because of the advances in technology, they are becoming as cheap to build as an unmanned ramp garage.
The chart below comes from SIU Carbondale professor Shannon Sanders McDonald:
Automated garages carry a higher overall cost because of their significantly higher maintenance costs for the computers and machinery, but they can be operated with almost no internal lighting, vehicles can be parked while turned off, and a denser volume of cars can be included in a given space.
Oh, and cars can’t be stolen from these garages, either, since there is no drive-off access.
So the result is a smaller carbon footprint, a smaller physical footprint, and increased security.
And with the advent of driverless cars, automated parking garages are poised to make a comeback.
Join Wealth Daily today for FREE. We’ll keep you on top of all the hottest investment ideas before they hit Wall Street. Become a member today, and get our latest free report: “The Top 5 High-Yield Small-Cap Dividend Stocks“
A Modern Solution for Urban Planning
Part of the appeal of self-parking ramp garages is that there’s no cumbersome system of elevators or lifts or cranes for hoisting cars into position.
A small company based in New Jersey has come up with a different solution for automatic parking that doesn’t require as much hard parking infrastructure and is more versatile in potential application.
The company is called Boomerang Systems Inc. (OTC: BMER), and its patent-pending system is known as RoboticValet.
It uses a proprietary system of battery-powered robots and computer-aided guidance to pick up cars and move them into and out of storage spaces.
Just three weeks ago, Boomerang Systems began construction on a 175-space RoboticValet system at a Florida resort owned by Liberty Grande LLC. When it’s completed in mid-2015, it will be the third complete parking system designed and built by Boomerang in as many years.
Boomerang’s value proposition is that it lets the developers “more efficiently, effectively and economically utilize its allowable building area and build residential units in space that would have otherwise been allocated to parking.”
Land is one of the most valuable assets known to man, and economizing space on that land is terrifically important.
It’s doubly important in densely populated areas.
Last Spring, Norman Garrick, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Connecticut, made a pointed claim: that too much urban space has been wasted on parking.
Garrick found “some car-centric cities forfeit more than a thousand dollars per parking space per year in potential municipal revenues by using land for parking rather than more lucrative alternatives,” according to Bloomberg Businessweek.
The Segway was originally heralded as the answer to the parking conundrum, but the kooky two-wheeled electric vehicle has proven far more successful as a tool for security guards and tourists. It didn’t kill the car, as some had hoped.
The future will still have tons of cars, and lots of them will be self-driving.
Despite the fact that some futurists think self-driving cars will simply “orbit” instead of park, that’s not feasible with current battery technology, and it’s certainly not responsible with current gas-powered technology.
At some point, all cars have to park. With automated garages, the traditional car and the driverless car alike can benefit.
Good Investing,
Tim Conneally
For the last seven years, Tim Conneally has covered the world of mobile and wireless technology, enterprise software, network hardware, and next generation consumer technology. Tim has previously written for long-running software news outlet Betanews and for financial media powerhouse Forbes.
