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The 228-space parking garage now under construction in downtown Raleigh will be unlike any other in North Carolina.
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The underground deck in the City Gateway district will be fully automated. Drivers pull their car into a bay and onto a pallet, turn off the engine and get out. An elevator takes the pallet and car down to a shuttle that moves them into a stall for storage, all without a human being involved.
Drivers will use an app to let the system know when they want their car back. The same shuttle and lift that stored the car will bring it back to the surface, in the bay that only the driver can access.
A company called Dasher Lawless Automation developed the AutoParkIt system in California in 2012. Four are operating in Los Angeles and another dozen are in various stages of development, including one in Detroit, said Shawn Adams, executive vice president of sales and client management.
Automated parking will be new to North Carolinians, Adams said, but that shouldn’t discourage them from trying it.
“It’s simple enough that if you could wash your car through an automatic car wash, you could park in an automatic garage,” he said. “It’s that intuitive.”
Capital City Urban Development, the company building City Gateway off McDowell Street at the southern end of downtown, chose AutoParkIt for several reasons, said Asher McGlothlin, development manager.
For starters, without ramps and other space for driving, the two-level automated garage will be able to hold twice as many cars as the same-sized standard deck. Automated decks are also cheaper to operate, in part because there’s no need for security.
“Once the car moves down the load bay and into the system, no one has access to that car anymore,” McGlothlin said.
The garage will serve future phases of the City Gateway development, which could include a hotel and office buildings. But in the meantime, when it opens this winter it will be available to the public from Kindley Street, off South Salisbury Street.
The deck might get its biggest test during events at the nearby Martin Marietta Center for the Performing Arts. There will be two bays for getting cars in and out of the garage, and if dozens of drivers all want their cars when a show lets out, there will be a wait.
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Adams said it takes the system less than three minutes to deliver a car. If a bunch of people ask for their cars at once via the app, the system will begin moving them toward the elevators, with cars from the closest stalls likely getting there first.
“The algorithms are built on efficiency and not fairness,” Adams said. “What matters is how many cars can we pump out as quickly as we can.”
He said the wait to drive off after a show should be comparable to what drivers experience in standard decks, except they will be waiting outside rather than sitting behind the wheel, creeping along in a line of cars.
Another variable is something Adams calls “dwell time.” That’s how long a car will sit in the bay waiting for the driver to get in and drive away. When no one else is waiting to use the bay, the car will sit there for up to 3 minutes before it gets re-parked. After a show, when there’s a line, the dwell time might be 20 or 30 seconds, he said.
“So you need to be there,” he said. “Don’t call your car if you’re not coming to pick it up.”
While AutoParkIt is designed to work without anyone on site, McGlothlin said City Gateway will likely have attendants present in the early days and during big events to help people navigate the system and keep things running smoothly.
The idea of automated parking is more than a century old, but a lack of reliability kept it from taking hold in the United States, Adams says. Dasher Lawless aims for zero downtime, and has achieved it with some of its garages, he said.
But another factor in the renewed interest in the systems is the high cost of real estate and construction.
“Developers have to squeeze every nickel out of a commercial development, and parking has always been a necessary evil,” Adams said. “You need the density. We can double the density as compared to the conventional approach, and that’s what’s driving it.”
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