Someone at the Linked in discussion group asked me a few questions. I thought my response might be of interest:
Perhaps I can clarify…
I think manufacturers oversell their features, and forget their
benefits. They also tend to stretch the truth a bit when it comes to the
time it takes to retrieve the cars. Case in point:
A manufacturer told me that it took between 45 seconds and one
and a half minutes to get a car retrieved. Fair enough. I then asked him if ten
people arrived at the same time (say after a theater let out), how long would
it take to get the 10th car. He said – Oh, about two minutes.
Now, no sentient being on the planet would believe that. Its patently absurd.
For a ‘stack park” or elevator valet system, these systems of
course are much more efficient and the garages can be relatively large. In New
York, many garages are ‘elevator’ garages. There is a small holding area on the
ground floor and then valets take the cars up in elevators to park them above.
They ride “manlifts” up and down. If you want your car, you give your ticket to
a valet and they ride up to the floor where it is, jockey cars around and bring
your car down in an elevator. If there is an onstreet valet, say at a hotel in
New York, or Chicago, or London, the car is taken to a garage, sometimes blocks
away.
In both cases you have to wait sometimes half an hour or more,
for your car. It’s just how long it takes.
If the manufacturers would pitch these garages as attendant free
valet, and compare return times to those in actual valet operations where cars
are stored in garages off site, the return times would probably beat the live
valet every time.
But once again, this has to do with the application of the
garage, not with the technology itself.
Another example – in a condo, apartment building, or office
building, the owner could call for their car when they left their office.
It could then be ‘staged’ by the system so when the parker arrived at the pick
up area, it was the next one to come out, or if it was a slow time, it was
there waiting. Gee, what oil sheik wouldn’t pay big bucks for that convenience.
As for the cost, consider this. They installed one of these
systems in New York City. If was on a site 90 by 100 feet. I’m making this up
but it’s like this. The surface lot the system replaced held 50 cars. The
mechanical garage held 125 cars plus it had retail on the street level and
apartments on the upper three floors. (The car park was underground). The cost
of the entire system was blended into the overall cost of the building. The
cost per space was certainly not cheap, but a standard garage would have been
impossible to build on the site (ramps and driveways would have made it
impossible), and without the automated garage, the building could not have met
the parking requirements of the area. So the cost of the facility was a bit
steep on a cost per space when compared with a standard garage, but a standard
garage could not be built.
In the infancy of this concept, Trevi Park’s Arturo Rossi
constantly spoke of retrieval times. He felt that it was a straw man that
concrete garage advocates put forth. The time should be counted from when you
enter the garage (on foot). You go up in the elevator, you walk to your car,
you get in, start the car and then drive out. That can take three/five minutes.
OK. You hand your ticket to an attendant or pay it in a machine, and your car
is brought to you, that can take three or four minutes. If it is very busy in
the garage you can wait for five, ten, fifteen minutes on the ramps when people
fight their way out of the facility. So it takes 15 minutes for people to get
their car back at peak traffic times, it’s really the same – Smart guy, that
Arturo.
As for maintenance – Its probably, in the lifetime of the
garage, less than a concrete garage. people don’t actually maintain concrete
garages until they start to fall down, and then spend millions to make it
right. My guess is you compared the ongoing maintenance etc to a concrete
garage (new membranes, cleaning, painting, security, and lighting, you would
probably see that ongoing maintenance for an automated garage was the same, if
not less.
It’s just that manufacturers of Automated garages are caught up
in the technology and computer wizardry, and forget that people don’t care,
they just want their cars, as quickly and conveniently as possible.
One last thing – if it takes 15 minutes to get my car in a
standard garage, and 10 minutes to get it from an Automated one, the chances
are that I would prefer the 15 minutes. In the automated one, I’m just
standing there, waiting. Smart Automated designers have something for me to do
while I’m waiting – watch TV, (even my car being retrieved), drop off my dry
cleaning, pickup a sandwich, etc. Makes a huge difference.
That’s about all I know about selling Automated Parking Systems
JVH
