Precious and Invisible

January 8, 2013 By
Mark Wright

If you’ve seen “The Hobbit,” you’ll recall the scene in which Bilbo Baggins slips the gold ring on his finger and becomes invisible, thus eluding a creepy character named Gollum. Gollum, becoming more frustrated by the moment, searches for Bilbo — right beneath his nose — in vain, scrambling around and wailing.

If “The Hobbit” is new territory for you and you think Tolkien is something you might deposit into a parking garage pay slot, this will just sound weird, but bear with me here: the whole tale is really about parking. There are pride-fueled battles over sacred territory. There’s a key to a door no one can see. Wayfinding is complicated by a map that can only be read in moonlight. And walking paths are fraught with peril.

The movie reminds me of my recent site visit with a couple of colleagues to a massive parking facility in a major metro area to check out some safety features and pathway striping. Standing against a ground-level wall, we watched — wide-eyed — as drivers and pedestrians violated one another’s boundaries like so many orcs and elves, although no swords were drawn. Drivers ignored arrows. Pedestrians ignored clearly-marked safe paths of travel. The color-coded lines were right under their noses, but seemed invisible.

Unfortunately, the garage has no wizard on hand to impose order and point out steps to take to protect precious lives. This peaceful chaos echoes the movie scene in which the raucous-but-jolly dwarves invade Bilbo’s home and pretty much do whatever they want. I exaggerate slightly, but, really, the experience is an eye-opener.

Bilbo’s encounter with Gollum takes place in a confusing subterranean maze called the goblin tunnels. He’s glad to make his escape. I can relate to his relief. Like Bilbo, we emerged from this place surprised, changed, and wiser.

As Tolkien writes in The Hobbit (chapter 4):  “There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something.”

Filed Under: Architecture, design, Management

Innovative Parking Garage Safety

November 30, 2012 By
Mark Wright

Thanks to some smart choices by Brookfield Properties, plus innovative design work and fabrication by their solutions providers, patrons at the recently revitalized FIGat7th parking garage in downtown Los Angeles are better protected from wayward vehicles.

“The structure itself is about 16 years old, and was in great need of an update as well as safety improvements,” says Warren Vander Helm, managing partner of the Parking Design Group. “Our client wanted to make the garage more appealing and the wayfinding clearer while at the same time making it safer for pedestrians.”

Two things that stand out are the use of bollards to provide protected paths of travel for pedestrians traversing the new Level 1 loading area, and an innovative steel platform at the Level 8 pay-on-foot machines. There, two pay stations are located against the wall nearest the elevators, which means patrons using the machines have their back to approaching vehicles — a significant vulnerability.

“Brookfield wanted to protect the patrons — not to mention the pay stations — from being run into, but this is on the eighth floor of a post-tension slab parking garage, so core drilling large bollards into the floor was impossible,” explains Rob Reiter of Blockaides, Inc. “The answer was to build a steel platform that the machines would sit on, with steel bollards built into the platform to provide protection.”

The platform, says Vander Helm, “is just slightly up off the floor so enough structural members can go underneath. Now, instead of simply hoping that no driver would ever have a mishap near the machines, companies like Brookfield Properties can install pay stations virtually anywhere and be confident that safety has not been compromised. It’s a great, affordable solution.”

Filed Under: design, Safety

Parking 20 Years From Now

October 4, 2012 By
Dave Feehan

Are city local governments and private developers that are building parking structures today with life expectancies of 50 years in the same boat as people who built horse stables in 1900? A number of companies have been at work in the U.S. refining a concept that has been working in Europe and Asia: the automated robotic parking garage.

I visited Boomerang’s model facility in New Jersey recently and I was impressed with how smoothly and efficiently it works. No up and down spirals, no slanted floors, and a building that can be used in any number of ways and can store any number of things besides cars.

California just became the second state to pass legislation permitting driverless cars. Several other states are considering such legislation, and Google, Toyota, and Cadillac are well into testing these vehicles. Add to these advances the acceptance of car- and bike-sharing programs, and in 20 or 30 years it may not be necessary to own a car, secure a driver’s license, or worry about tickets at all.

People living in urban areas will only need a smartphone (maybe worn on a wrist?) to summon a “personal transportation unit” that will pick them up, deliver them to their destination, and then proceed to either the next customer or a charging station. These vehicles may well use Segway technology, and will be relatively small, light, and electrically powered. Some people may still own more conventional vehicles, but even these will probably have driverless technology, obviating the need for traffic signals and reducing auto accidents to a very low level, thus reducing traffic congestion.

Automated parking structures can be built to be readily convertible to office or residential use once development patterns change, so there will be no need to tear down expensive conventional parking garages that are still structurally sound.

None of us knows for sure how fast these changes will occur, and how readily people will adapt to them, but think of the speed of innovation in other industries, and think of the energy savings and cost savings that could occur if we move in this direction. If I were a parking director for a city, hospital, university, or private development, I would think long and hard about this technology.

Filed Under: design, Planning

Goldilocks and the Three Parking Approaches

September 6, 2012 By
Brett Wood

I am sure you have all heard the cautionary tale of Goldilocks, about a young girl who entered the house of a family of bears and tried their food, chairs, and beds. In the story, Goldilocks is not a fan of the food, chairs, and beds of the larger bears, but the baby bear’s items are just right!

Now, you may be asking yourself, “Has Brett lost his mind? He’s blogging about a children’s story.”

Let me get to the point. We’re going to examine differing parking planning philosophies like Goldilocks would.

The traditional method for defining parking needs included looking in a manual or a dusty old city code ordinance and doing a simple series of calculations that defined parking needs based on a building’s total square footage. Let’s call this the “Too Big” approach. Typically, codes are based on sampling of suburban sites, which begs the question, “Why are we applying suburban parking practices in our downtown?”

Newer methodologies include “shared parking,” which has drastically changed the way we plan for parking. Under this philosophy, the planner would look for compatible land uses that might be able to share a common pool of parking spaces. The analysis would use typical time of day patterns to predict peak and hourly parking conditions. The problem with this approach? We are still using generic parking generation rates that come from a small sample of sites, which can still result in a misrepresentation of parking. Let’s call this the “Slightly Too Big” approach.

The newest form of planning takes the form of “Right Sized Parking,” and is a concept that aims to localize parking decisions by factoring in unique conditions such as transit, user characteristics, and actual demand attributes. The intent of this approach is to better define parking demand, reduce (or sometimes enlarge) parking needs based on actual community characteristics, and provide more developable space. It is based on local data, either collected continuously or modeled in parking planning applications.

Given the state of urban planning, smart growth, and increased efficiency through sustainability measures and infrastructure reduction, isn’t it time parking got it just right? The next time you sit down to think about how you manage your community’s supply and demand, think about Goldilocks and just the right size.

 

Filed Under: design, Planning