Parking World

Return of the Robots

Robotic Parking Systems (RPS) opened the Middle East's first robotic car park in Dubai in August, 2009. The car park, located at Ibn Batuta Gate, a shopping, hotel and office complex in Jebel Ali, is a success for RPS, especially when the construction is compared with the company's last robotic parking project in Hoboken, New Jersey.

 

"The Ibn Battuta Gate car park actually took less time to build than the previous garage despite an increase in size from 324 spaces to

765 spaces," says Constantin Haag, Chief Operating Officer, RPS. "The Hoboken garage was started in 1999 and completed in 2002. The Ibn Battuta Gate garage was completed in half the time even though it was more than twice as large."

 

"The major part of the garage construction was well in hand when the economic downturn hit," Haag adds. "While it may have slowed down the overall project to which the garage is attached, we dodged the worst of it."

 

Those familiar with the Hoboken project may ask: What has changed? Why did this project go so much faster?

 

"There are two factors in play," Haag explains. "First is simply that good quality management means you strive to learn and improve constantly. Robotic Parking pioneered the return of automated parking to the US -- first with the demonstration garage in Ohio and then the first new commercial project in New Jersey -- and the experience gained there and in other projects is brought to bear on the next.

The second is that there was much less red tape to deal with in Dubai. That alone probably added a year to the project in New Jersey."

 

Haag says that in Dubai there were absolutely no codes covering this type of technology. Robotic parking was a new technology for all the concerned authorities. So RPS was able to contribute to the development and implementation of several new codes to facilitate future projects.

 

"Robotic Parking Systems is working with others in the industry to develop codes and standards that will hopefully speed future projects in the US," Haag adds.

 

So far it appears that the lessons learned by RPS have been put to practical use. Hopefully we will see even more improvements on the company's next project, the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC), which is even larger, at 1,200 spaces, with completion expected in Spring 2010.

Traffic Engineering 101

My town centre has just been refurbished. This is where the Council lets a developer knock down a part of what is already there to build virtually the same stuff. The result is that traders in the older bit move into the new bit leaving their old shops empty and what with the building and businesses moving the entire place just always looks run down. OK so we got a new budget hotel but lost local businesses that have around for fifty years or more. A cornerstone store was one of the UK's bigger supermarket chains. Their existing store was quite small, it had already lost business to a newer bigger store about 5 miles away but it met a local need for a lot of older people who would walk or bus in and buy their groceries a day at a time. They moved to the new bit into a store that's twice as big because they sell clothing and "home ware" instead of just food, the sort of stuff old folks don't buy. The old store was in the covered mall; this one is in the open, twice as far from the bus stop and has its own car park. The "shoppers car park charges $1.50 for two hours parking which is refunded at the checkout for customers. By the car park there is a road which carries all the local bus routes, access to the nearby main car parks and lorries servicing half the shopping centre so do you a) divert the road round the edge of the car park so shoppers are safe or b) put the road through the middle of the car park and hope for the best? Answers on a post card please. Yes they have put a pedestrian crossing in but that's to try and deal with the problem that they have created.

Let the Train Take the Strain

That was an advert used here to get us to use trains rather than drive. Now that we are all trying to save the planet it seems even more relevant and so when I was planning a trip to Liverpool (5-600 mile round trip from castle Guest) I looked at the train option as being better than driving for 4-5 hours each way. It's a long journey most of it would be in darkness and pretty tiring. If I take the train I have go via London with three trains and it isn't much quicker. The killer is that the train fare is about $350; this is to take a trip, not to buy the train. Now Liverpool is about the most inaccessible place in Britain by plane. There is an airport but last time I checked the only way to fly from the London region was to take a flight to the Isle of Man and then take one back to Liverpool. Since the justification for expanding Heathrow include improving inter-Britain flights this is pretty pathetic. Hang on a minute though there is now a flight from Southampton (40 minutes drive) which takes 50 minutes and costs a hundred bucks less than the train. Guess that I'll save the planet tomorrow.

The Not-So-Great Wall of China

It was all over in 30 seconds. A nearly-complete 13-story apartment building in Shanghai China fell over in June, while remaining basically intact. The worst part is that a construction worker was killed, raising concerns about China's construction standards. Seven people in charge of the construction were arrested for causing a major accident.

The building, located in Shanghai's southwestern Minhang district, fell after the ground gave way on one side of the building, due to excavation of an underground parking garage. My personal recommendation is to always build the underground garage first, before constructing the building above it.

Parking World recently reported that China will be the largest car buyer in 2009. The China Passenger Association predicts full-year auto sales will grow by 44% over last year – to 13.5 million – making China the world's largest auto market. More cars will inevitably lead to more parking infrastructure, which could be a huge potential problem because China's construction industry has been gaining a reputation for poor quality and materials.

A picture says a thousand words, and in this case some of those words are: construction regulations must be improved in this rapidly growing economy. Some of the other words are probably expletives uttered by the unfortunate people who planned to reside in this building.

 

 

Pete Goldin

City Having A “Bad” Christmas

Litchfield in Staffordshire England is going to have a bad Christmas. With just over two weeks to go to Christmas the Borough has announced the emergency closure of its main town centre multi-storey car park after an engineer's inspection declared the building unsafe. At the peak of the year's shopping activity the town has lost a large part of its parking. Council Leader David Smith, said: "With Christmas shopping in full swing, it is a really unfortunate time of year to close one of our main city car parks. However, our primary concern has to be people's safety. Because of this, we have had no choice but to close the multi-storey".

I a burst of what I would have thought was totally unfounded optimism a council spokesman confirmed that the closure may only be temporary; presumably they have self healing concrete in Litchfield? I remember when the late great Sam Bhuyan of Walker Parking looked at the UK parking scene he became incredibly frustrated at how short-sighted many UK municipalities were when they looked at asset protection concepts. Car parks made money but there was seldom any plan to invest some of that money back into keeping the car park in good condition. Now I don't know what the situation is in Litchfield but if I were a betting man…

Peter Guest

Only in England.

They say that you don't have to be mad to live here but it helps. A fine example of English eccentricity has just come on the market for anyone with about $1.5m plus to spare. In 1769 George III enacted legislation for the Earl of Abingdon to build a toll bridge across the Thames, at Swinton near Oxford, with a ban on any other bridges within three miles either way. The Earl ran a ferry but did a deal whereby, in return for building a stone bridge, parliament enacted a law giving the tax-free income from the tolls to him, his "heirs and assigns" for ever.

Some 240 years later; about 10,000 cars a day cross the bridge and although they only pay about 8 cents toll the income each year is about $300,000 tax free. Annual running and maintenance costs are about half of this, the rest is money in the bank. To some this is an example of what makes England England, for the locals queuing to pay their 5p each day, it's a pain in the ass and they want the anachronism done away with. The 5p toll is set by government. The bridge has been sold for just over £1m which gives the purchaser about 10% return on their investment tax free, not bad.

Peter Guest

CPTED Lighting the Way to Safer Car Parks

CPTED is gaining an increasing influence on parking lot design around the world. (CPTED is Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design, and is pronounced "sep-ted"). For example, Auckland and other cities in New Zealand are basing their CARPARK+ Safer Parking initiative on CPTED.

The Canada-based International CPTED Association (ICA) defines CPTED as a multi-disciplinary approach to deterring criminal behavior through environmental design. According to ICA, CPTED strategies rely upon the ability to influence offender decisions that precede criminal acts by affecting the built, social and administrative environment.

When I first heard about CPTED, I assumed it was simply about making car parks brighter, with less hiding spaces for criminals and more CCTV cameras. Barry Davidson, Executive Director for ICA, assured me that CPTED is much more. Lighting, for example, is an important aspect of CPTED, but it is not as simple as I thought.

"We look at lighting very carefully, on a human scale," Davidson says, pointing out that the psychology of the design is a critical component of CPTED, intended to influence the behavior of criminals, but also improve the comfort of the car park patrons. "For example, most people are comfortable if they can identify someone walking towards them from 20-30 feet away. However, a lot of lighting is set so high that everything is in shadow, so you could see a body coming toward you but you don't have any kind of comfort level because you cannot identify them."

Davidson says the type of lighting can be a vital factor, in relation to a specific environment.

"In an inner city, high crime area, for example, we might use high-pressure sodium or some other type of light that washes out the color of skin," he explains. "Needle users can't see a vein, so they are not going to go there to shoot up. We have used that approach quite successfully."

With car parks constantly portrayed as dark and dangerous scenes of the crime in the media, CPTED could go a long way toward changing that perception.