A fully automated basement parking garage is slated to be unveiled in New York City's Chinatown this February. This garage will cram 67 cars into a volume typically occupied by only 24 cars in a traditional garage. Via San Francisco Chronicle.
I'm just waiting for New York to build parking garages like Volkswagen's storage facility in Germany [Neatorama].
"Another company had built the only other public robotic garage in the United States, the one with a checkered past.
Built in 2002 across the river in Hoboken, N.J., with 314 spaces for monthly rentals only, the garage dropped an unoccupied Cadillac Deville six floors in 2004 and a Jeep four stories the following year. Early last year, a malfunction that went unrepaired for 26 hours trapped cars inside."
I'll be sure to wait in line to have my car parked there! ;)
apparently the company who sold the software to the Hoboken Parking garage was not fully paid and stopped updating the software regularly causing the malfunction....
http://parkingtoday.typepad.com/parking_blog/2006/08/is_the_automate.html
so the lesson to NYC is you can fire a human w/o pay but you cant fire a computer system w/o paying first....good luck
http://www.muenchen.de/Rathaus/bau/projekte/tg_donnersberger/170710/index.html
And sometimes two fall through the ramp?
^g^
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,71554-0.html