Elegant Automatic Parking

[Peter Bock]

Take a look at this!

http://www.woehr.de/en/projekte/budapest_m730/index.htm

It was sent to me by a professional artist who appreciates technology
that is efficient, user-friendly, environmentally responsible, AND
contextually attractive (fussy, fussy):

Of course, the reason Budapest has this system is because Hungary,
unlike the US, is such a wealthy country --- especially for a
socialist democracy. It's also interesting to note that Germany,
another socialist democracy, manufactures this innovative product, not
the US.

Oops! I used that bad word (twice)!

[Benjamin Rubinger]

I think this working system is a great step forward. It can be
improved on several points, I think some of them are crucial:

1. The storage orientation is vertical! It appears to be
subterranean, which means expensive excavation to construct the
facility. It is much cheaper in money, energy, and environment to
build out instead of down. That's why existing parking lots are
horizontal, and vertical parking lots with elevators do not commonly
exist. I have trouble imagining a facility with this design replacing
the parking lot of even a modest American mall if you have to dig that
much. You would have to do multiple rows, and then you have a bunch
of the garages wasting space, and you have to remember the exact row
you parked in - that is one of the problems this is supposed to solve
in the first place.

2. It also requires complex "pick and place" units to manipulate the
car pallets. This is a major limitation with this design - these pick
and place units are the bottleneck for parking throughput, and take
time and energy to both store and retrieve each car pallet. I would
guess that these active units are the major operating cost of a
facility like this. The garage doors, rollers, and the payment
machines are the only other moving parts, and they seem pretty cheap
and reliable.

Both issue 1 and 2 are avoidable, while still using the vast majority
of the existing demonstrator. Layout the parking horizontally and get
rid of the pick and place units. Here's how:

The videos show the pallet rolling from the garage onto the pick and
place unit. Replace the pick and place unit with a fixed-function
lift that raises the car a few feet. Everything can be mechanically
actuated. Place the pallet onto a free rolling track graded at a
degree or two off of horizontal. Think boxes on a shipping converyer
belt. The conveyer belt is passive, but safely guides the boxes. The
track slaloms across the parking until the first available spot
diverts the next car to roll along that wants to park into the open
spot. The pallet sinks down or is pulled up above the track using
springs and pneumatics. All of the exiting cars just roll through the
track - there could be shortcuts for them in large parking lots. Half
of the cars in the parking lot can queue up at once to exit, and the
bottleneck then is garages. The pallets roll down to the garage level
where they began, and the converyers there can rotate and place the
pallets in the garages ready to go.

Horizontal layout like this would be much more compatible with the
existing parking infrastructure, and it would be possible to convert
over to automatic parking piecemeal, with much less (or no) excavation
or even construction.