The Traditional Parking Garage
One of the most popular parking structures in the world is the parking garage. It is commonly chosen because it allows for parking of a high volume of vehicles in a reasonable amount of space. They make it relatively easy to monitor incoming and outgoing customers and enforce payment with centralized entrances and exits.
Despite offering these limited benefits to parking customers, parking garages have many drawbacks including the fact that they:
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usually require a large amount of excavation make the site ready for construction.
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require a large amount of expensive materials (concrete, asphalt, steel, etc.)
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can be hard for customers to manoeuver around tight turns
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can be difficult to provide suitable security
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provide many possibilities for vehicles to be damaged
The limitations and drawbacks that are present with traditional parking garages have led to advances in the parking model on which these systems are based. There are now automated parking garages that offer substantial upgrades in every area over traditional parking garages.
Automated Parking Garages
There was a lot of room for improvement when analyzing the traditional parking garage model, most importantly the huge cost of the materials required to build as well as the parking efficiency it offers.
New types of parking garages have been built on the theory of stacking vehicles on platforms vertically. While traditional parking garages do allow for a small level of vertical parking, these new parking garages improve on that process by making the system much more compact allowing more vehicles to be parked vertically in much less space. This makes the parking process much more efficient and cuts down drastically on the total amount of area needed to park the vehicles.
These new parking garages are often called automated parking garages because they use moving parts to park the vehicles. The process of parking cars can be as simple as using hydraulic motors to lift the vehicle vertically to park it, or it can be as complex as moving the vehicle left, right, up or down to park it in a specific location depending on the system.
Other instant benefits of implementing an automated parking garage:
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Can be implemented with little to no excavation required
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Don't require much in the way of materials since they are, for the most part, already assembled
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The customer drives straight into and out of the loading platform, reducing chances of accidents
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The system is very compact so it can be easily secured
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The chances of vehicles being damaged by other customers is eliminated.
Uses for Automated Parking Garages
There are many different models of these parking solutions that allow for them to be used in varied and widespread applications. The versatility of these systems is helping to make them become very popular in the following areas:
Automated parking garages offer the unique ability to combine the convenience of automating much of the parking process while also greatly increasing parking efficiency. They are also easier and quicker to implement than traditional parking garages.