“In Europe and Asia, the development history, traffic patterns,
and parking ''culture'' are different, she said, and cities
simply are not built to accommodate the hulking presence of a
typical ramped structure. There are roughly 5,000 automated
garages on those two continents”
''This is amazingly proficient use of space,'' commented Darius
Sollohub,
a New Jersey Institute of Technology professor who studies
parking and urban land use. ''It may provide one of the
solutions to the most important conflict in urban design: where
do you put all the cars in environments where car volume is high
and space is at a premium?''
“Although an automated garage is more expensive to build it
typically takes only about half as much precious real estate as
a conventional ramped garage to handle the same number of cars,
or even more. That is why in European and Asian cities, the
automatic garage was long ago anointed as the best solution, Mr.
Sollohub
said. “
“Urban land use specialists say that this sort of situation will
continue to occur in congested American cities, and that
automated parking could become a widely used option.”