Why America Needs More Robotic Parking

Posted on | September 4, 2012 | No Comments

More primitive elevator-style parking has been around since the mid–20th century, but advanced automatic garages are more like three-dimensional chessboards: hydraulic pallets and computerized shelving park up to 250 cars per hour, with 32 cars in motion at any time. As cities become denser, the cost of high-density parking begins to pencil out for developers because it reduces parking square footage requirements by 50 to 75 percent, say experts, some of whom participated in a seminar held earlier this year in Los Angeles, presented by the University of California at Los Angeles ­Ziman Center for Real Estate.

All aspects of automated robotic parking was discussed, including safety issues.   Boomerang Systems RobiticValet™ operates on concrete slab floors providing one of the best fire safety features.  Here are a few comments from the seminar:

“If you have high-density development, it makes sense to have high-density parking,” says Donald C. Shoup, professor of urban planning at UCLA. “Talk to any developer: they say for small or irregular sites, robotic parking is the answer to space constraints. It will unlock the real estate potential of many urban infill sites.”

“Fire safety is clearly the biggest issue from a public point of view,” says Robert R. “Bud” Ovrom, general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety. “You have cars with full tanks of gasoline stacked much [more closely] than they normally would be. And cars are designed to be impervious to water. We care a lot about firefighter safety. We don’t want firefighters on dangerous gangways or catwalks. We have to build zones where they can work safely. The concrete-slab floors provide the best for that, while the ‘erector set’ mechanical gangways provide the least of that. That’s why many of the newer systems use concrete floors.”

Read the full article by Jack Skelley

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