ITS-Park Rationale – It’s Importance for World Parking and City Design

 

To me, there are overwhelming needs for, and potential impacts from, designing and deploying automated car parking facilities throughout the world. The material below is intended to be a capsule summary of those needs and areas of impact. But the dreamed of ITS-Park solution will only be meaningful if there is a plausable path for getting there. I intend to describe one or more such paths,  as my blog moves along. Stay tuned!

Automated car parking at ITS-Park garages should be well received by smartcar owners because of the savings it will offer in time, cost and convenience. But it’s also important is to consider the context of its expected future existence: A more populous world which will be more environmentally sensitive; a world of expanding cities and increasing numbers of mega cities; the re-shaping of cities into more people friendly city designs; and its relationship to improvements in future transportation systems.

 1. ITS-Park should introduce huge improvements in society’s efficient use of parking resources – the core of sustainability – which is so essential as we experience continued growth in world population; the growth of mega-cities; and the expansion of society’s consumption of those resources. ITS-Park’s should be significantly smaller than today’s self-park garages, paring down the amount of materials and energy required to construct our “car barns”. Their smaller size will reduce the energy required for travel along the interior streets and ramps of the parking garage. Their control accuracy will  likewise reduce energy requirements by directing cars to empty parking spaces via the shortest route.

 ITS-Park deployment should encourage small car choice by consumers, linking ITS-Park systems to auto buyer’s choice of cars. The smaller the car driven, the smaller will be the daily cost of parking, contrary to today’s self-park designs with their “one size fits all” philosophy.

 2. ITS-Park systems will greatly influence the design and redesign of cities throughout the world. They will:

• Reduce the negative connotations of “sprawl” by reducing the overall amount of land needed for parking cars; facilitate more shared parking.
• Provide for more desirable pedestrian oriented walking areas by reducing the scale of car parks; moving them away from pedestrian streets; introduce remote parking wherein smartcars drive themselves along underground or elevated guideways to parking sites some distance away from city centers.
• Allow more car parking underground, freeing up surface land uses for parks, etc., by greatly improving underground construction economics.

 3. ITS-Park should improve automotive transportation systems time efficiency, or the productivity of trips requiring parking at their final destination. Long commuting trips include a line haul segment, circulation segments at both ends, and, finally, car parking. Innovations like HOV lanes are saving commuters significant amounts of time. But circulating around streets hunting for parking after exiting a HOV lane, and spending the time to manually park and walk through a big parking garage will increasingly seem counterproductive. Locating ITS-Park structures closer to freeway and arterial junctions, along with the elimination of personal parking time, will enhance overall trip productivity.

• The introduction of ITS-Park capabilities will also enhance the feasibility of transportation systems, such as improving transit rider ship through faster and more convenient park-and-ride service; providing access to numerous, convenient underground ITS-Park garages for city center car sharing services; and facilitating new lightweight people-mover (ITS-mover) linking services.

Can you envision such impacts from the idea of ITS-Park? Can you see even more possibilites?

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