Want a robot to park your car? Don’t hold your breath.
By Jolene Fisher
Illustration by Matt Kindt
You know that bad-to-worse feeling you get when you make it back to the parking garage after blowing last week’s paycheck on tickets and concessions at the new Busch, only to realize you have no idea where you left the Family Truckster? Some residents of Hoboken, N.J., were able to put that parking quagmire behind them in 2005, thanks to a garage that sounds more Star Trek than Stadium East. Robotic Parking Systems built, as the name implies, a fully automated parking garage in which drivers need only pull up and step out. The unmanned vehicle is then whisked away on a pallet and stored until the owner comes back, at which point it is retrieved and turned around so the driver can easily pull away.
It’s convenient for the impatient parker, but Jeff Faria, spokesman for RPS, touts the space-saving qualities as well. Without the ramps and pedestrian walkways to suck up space, the automated garage can hold twice as many cars as a standard garage. “You can take a densely packed neighborhood with one empty lot,” Faria explains, “and build a garage for the whole neighborhood.”
Could St. Louis’ burgeoning downtown benefit from a futuristic facelift?
In fact, St. Louis was ahead of the times with an early version of the robotic garage behind the Lennox Hotel (now the Renaissance St. Louis Suites Hotel) in the late ’50s. “It was a fiasco,” says Jack Pohrer, owner of the St. Louis Parking Co., “and the fact that they aren’t that plentiful now tells me two things: Either they’re cost-prohibitive or they haven’t been perfected yet.” (He might be onto something: A contract dispute last summer between the city of Hoboken and Robotic Parking trapped hundreds of cars in the garage for several days.)
Deputy building commissioner Frank Oswald is confident that the technology would be up to par but feels that St. Louis lacks the demand for robotic parking. “The cost of land is cheaper here than out east, so we can build regular parking garages and parking lots cheaper,” he says, “and at this point I don’t think the market is here to charge enough in parking fees to pay for it.”
Until the future makes its way west, there’s always valet.
