World 2020: Her New Smart Car Parks Itself Downtown
Posted by itsparker on October 31, 2009
Ms. G, environmentally conscious, yet pragmatic, has sold her old 17 foot long SUV and become the proud owner of a mini-sized Intelligent Transportation Systems based car which is only 12 feet long, narrower and lower, with much better gas mileage and emissions. She’s headed downtown today with a colleague. Before departing, she enters an ITS-Park request into her smartphone. The response comes back quickly – two ITS-Park garages are available with different prices and differences in convenience to her final destination. She reserves one and the navigation information is instantaneously transferred to her cell phone. She and her colleague drive downtown using the convenience of a High Occupancy Toll (HOT) lane, finally arriving at her ITS-Park exit, labeled “Green Magic #1”. She drives directly inside the ITS-Park garage, into a heated and air conditioned area. As she drops her speed to 5 mph, a voice, and a dashboard display, advise her to push the ITS-Park button, and remove hands and feet from the car controls – her vehicle is now under automatic control. The car drives itself to the load/unload area, parking in one of a dozen side-by-side spaces, where a large display, immediately in front of her windshield, highlights the procedure for exiting her car and retrieving it later on. The same information is displayed on her smartphone and a printout is also available as she exits her car. As she and her passenger exit the space, her colleague pauses in amazement as she watches the car slowly disappear from view, driving itself away.
While Ms. G and her colleague are walking to their destination, her ITS car continues on the move. It has received a temporary identity – let’s just call it Ella 3018 for now. Ella 3018 tells the garage command and control center that its sensors indicate the vehicle is empty of people and animals; all persons have left that parking space; it is ready to move, using zero emissions electric power only. The garage sends Ella 3018 a command to move to space16, third floor right, while downloading needed navigation information. Ella 3018 maneuvers out of the entry space, has its profile automatically measured to ensure it has no unusual items hanging outside, and proceeds to a connecting ramp. It climbs a series of ramps; traverses aisles narrower than those found in self-parking decks; and becomes part of a moving convoy of ITS cars, all likewise headed for empty parking spaces. Complex software controls the movement of those cars, along with other vehicles exiting parking spaces and headed downward. Finally arriving at space 16 right on the third floor, Ella 3018 turns into the designated parking area and comes to a halt. Ella 3018’s clearances to vehicles on either side are as little as 6 inches due to the precision of ITS controls, with no need to provide extra door clearances for persons entering or exiting vehicles. There are no electro-mechanical devices, chains, gears, pallets, etc., lifting, pulling or pushing the car, requiring frequent maintenance with the possibility of failure.
The title “Green Magic” was chosen by General Motors to cover the complete line of ITS-Park garages it now offers. GM got into this business as a terrific growth opportunity, recognizing the need for one company to provide the reliable electronics, communications and software for ITS cars and their applications such as ITS-Park. This storage garage parks 2000 “mini” cars, each of which is hybrid or electric powered, operating exclusively on electric power while inside the garage. The garage is amazingly small, compared to the old manual parking garages, encompassing an area footprint of less than half the size. Each floor’s height is also much reduced, since no patrons ever have to walk around inside the car storage areas.
Leaving her office building at the end of the day, Ms. G taps the ITS-Park icon on her smart phone, entering her anticipated arrival time. The ITS-Park central computer, using data from all such requests, computes the expected time for her car to back out and traverse the distance to a ground floor exit space. She receives an instantaneous confirmation, defining the ETA of her car at the retrieval space for 5 minutes later than her requested time. She times her walk from the office to arrive at that time, knowing she will receive an “excess wait time” charge for “blocking” her designated load/unload space if she is more than two minutes late. Ella 3018 meanwhile receives its “wakeup” call, backs out, and becomes part of the queue of exiting vehicles. Ms. G arrives at her designated exit space shortly after Ella3018 arrives; enters her car and notes the automatic parking charge displayed on her cell phone and in front of the car windshield.
As Ms. G departs, she basks in the significance of the improvement that the ITS-Park capability has made in her daily commute. She saves more than 15 minutes of commute time each way, since she no longer has to leave home early because of parking uncertainty; nor wend her way through surface streets to get to a parking structure; nor drive around multiple floors of a structure searching for an empty space. She also saves the walk to an elevator; the elevator wait and ride; and the time to exit the structure. Because the ITS-Park structure is much smaller in size, her cost of parking has been reduced to less than half of her previous daily charge. And big pluses – she has the convenience and safety of valet parking; does not have to turn over her keys for someone else to drive her car; and can leave personal items inside with no theft fears. She truly considers it Green Magic!
Jerry Roane said
My system called TriTrack self parks the car after it leaves the owner under the portico by the front door. Our approach simplifies the trip to the roof where our light weight cars park themselves much like commercial inventory control robots do. The path to the roof is on a pipe that is bent to be a triangle. This makes the trajectory cheap and easy for the building owner to accommodate these light weight high speed cars. Initially the parking volume will be low and one vertical pipe would be needed for a big box store and as we gain market share there would be multiple parallel paths up the side of the building. In a full city-wide implementation the cars will park miles away and come running when you hit the button on your key fob. The guideway makes the engineering job much simpler and automatic driving in protected areas would allow cars to navigate the city to find you again after you park. The key is parking the car on its tail. This reduces the area for parking ten fold. Because the cars are composite and around 300 pounds there is no special requirement for the roof structure. Roofs are designed for snow load and on snow days there is no parking until the snow is cleared. Usually not a problem in most locations. At the home the car parks on its tail in a special closet that looks like a chimney on the house but allows for storage space below from inside the house. Automatic cars are coming and parking is the first easy step. TriTrack.net to see the video of the roof parking trolley.
itsparker said
I went to your referenced website and reviewed your TRiTrack video. I have the following comments:
1. ITS-Park targets parking conventional automobiles that drive on asphalt/concrete streets and freeways, which are the backbone of the world’s transportation system.
2. Over the past 40 years I have looked at 50 or more types of PRT concepts using unique cars riding under, above, or on the side, of various novel guideway designs – including some planning to include so-called dual-mode operations. While working in advanced transportation at Ford Motor Company, I was responsioble for sometimes answering new transportation system letters addressed to Mr. Ford, which generally said: “Dear Mr. Ford, with my idea and your manufacuring capability, we can both make a fortune”.
3. I commend you for your original thinking. TriTrack might have some potential as a toy. In my personal opinion, there are probably a hundred reasons why it, and many other PRT ideas, will never become practical transportation systems.
Thank you for taking the time to read my blog and respond.
Jerry Roane said
Thank you for taking the time to look at the concept and I have seriously thought about making this a toy for older kids. I can personally afford all the tooling for a toy version. The battery exchange and charging would allow the toy to operate continuously rather than the typical RC car that is great fun till the battery pack runs flat. All that aside your comment of one hundred reasons is pretty vague. Perhaps you could hint further having been in the belly of the beast. I did interview for the EV1 with GM and that education was priceless. I could see the seeds of the EV1 destruction in its beginning. Ford (Mr. Ford)
never managed to attempt an electric at the time of the EV1 so I am very curious what Ford was thinking at the time of the EV1. The big three seem to bank on continuous gasoline and/or diesel supplies which is fine for an aging controlling class but not a long term strategy. 130 mpg equivalent is a minimum and I do not see anything from Ford in this range. Do you have any insight into Ford’s ability to compete with a 130 mpgE car? Our three patents describe the network, the car and its battery swap and the track building machine that builds track (guideway) at 3 mph and at $170,000 per mile. If your 100 reasons are it makes enemies then yes you are correct there will be enemies of improvements to the car that are considered too good and disrupt the controlling class. I distance myself from pure PRT as I think pure PRT advocates lack flexibility. Dual mode is just a car but it also does great things while on the guideway. We are talking to Ford’s major competitor so the 100 reasons might only be 99. 
My Chinese suppliers are able to rock the car world with price and capacity. Example; our spindle costs me $3.65. No US car manufactuer can touch this price.
jerry schneider said
My main concern would be getting the parking facilities and the demand for them matched up adequately so that jam ups would not occur when demand exceeded supply. There is a chicken/egg problem here too. I would imagine that such parking structures could be built in locations that now provide surface parking. Their location would be of great importance and the cost of building them on high priced land would be considerable as well as dealing with residents in high density area perhaps not welcoming them next door. And there is the problem of increasing the capacity of the on/off facilities that deal with what could be a greatly increased volume on the HOT lanes. How many times would a person not be able to get a space in their 1st or 2nd choice parking location? What alternatives would such a person have, walking/riding) to get to their destination quickly to/from their 3rd or 4th choice? How much would greater would capacity have to be to insure that a high proportion of 1st and 2nd choices would be successful? One could track the sales of the smart cars and get some sense of
the overall likely demand, but forecasts of location-specific demand would be much harder to come by.
Anyway, it’s a stimulating blog entry and certain deals with the greatest problem faced by dualmode concepts, at least those would would arise in high density locations. But since our cities are getting more and more polycentric, featuring large number of less dense, more spacious activity centers, there would seem to be numerous non-historic-downtown locations where this supply-demand matching problem would be less difficult.
itsparker said
Jerry, thanks for your thoughtful input. You raise two important points that are of concern in the introduction of any new technology – supply and demand matching and the chicken/egg problem. I like to draw an analogy between cell phones and ITS-Park for both. In both cellphones and smartcars with ITS-Park, you need to match the supply and demand between product manufacturers, owners/users, system operators, and infrastructure suppliers. You also need to devise and obtain agreement on one or more world standards to allow competition. The cellphone industry has managed to accomplish all this – and continues to deal with it as their technologies change and improve. This will certainly be the case for introducing and expanding the use of smartcars simultaneously with ITS-Park infrastructure.
Also, the chicken/egg problem was solved by the cellphone industry by starting with big, heavy, clunky cellphones in a limited number of cities and then expanding – rapidly – around the whole world. So car manufacturers will have to deal with selling a limited number of smartcars in just a few cities, while coordinating the simultaneous construction and operation of ITS-Park facilities.
Both problems are difficult, but that’s what new industries learn to solve – the means to achieving great profits, because it hasn’t been done before. I look forward to seeing smartcars and ITS-Park become the bases for a new industry – within the next decade!
itsparker
itsparker said
I prefer to keep my blog focused on parking problems and how, when and why the idea of ITS-Park might emerge. I do not wish to get involved in PRT or electric vehicles issues. Thank you.
cmf-seattle said
ok, have fun with your ignorant blog.