A better parking solution

What could be better than a big stack of Ferraris? How about being able to park loads of them in a tiny urban space?

Roller coaster extraordinary Stan Checketts is now building automated parking and self-storage systems targeted at urban developers who are ever so crunched to find space for their cars. His company, Boomerang Systems, demonstrates parking machines that the same number of cars in about half the space of a regular parking garage. More relevantly, they claim these are cheaper than structured parking.

Check out this video demonstration of the technology. It’s cool stuff. This has been around in Europe and Japan for a while, now it’s getting bigger in Seattle, San Fransisco, and Portland. Now that construction costs are what they are, this kind of alternative parking technology opens up new potential for infill development that was previously infeasible.

The one drawback? Wait time. If you make the garage too big it can take up to 3 minutes to get your car out. Not a big deal for an individual, but when dozens of people show up all at once that could cause a very frustrating line. I’m sure that they can improve the delivery time on bigger garages by putting in multiple lifts or speeding up the cranes, however – and waits shouldn’t be a problem on small parking projects.

I wouldn’t be surprised if we started seeing more and more of these kinds of innovative parking solutions appearing in Houston soon. If you’ve spotted one locally, tell me about it in a comment!