By Milirsan Pugalendiran, B.Eng. Civil Engineering, Lassonde School of Engineering – York University
Tom Arnold Scholarship in Parking Industry Advancement at York University 2018 Recipient
With the rise of mass-manufactured automobiles, a new industry was created. The parking industry was born with rise of affordable automobiles and has changed significantly since Henry Ford’s invention of the assembly line in 19081. The parking industry started off with simple parking lot designs and has now evolved to parking lots capable of self-parking. We now face even greater challenges with the rise of Autonomous vehicles which calls for “Smarter” parking lots. This article looks at how the Parking Industry has changed over the years and what the future holds for parking.
Past
The first automobile can be as early found in the late 1600’s but the parking industry began with the rise of the mass-produced vehicle, the “Model T”1. Something that was only for the wealthy had now become affordable for the average person.
People needed a space to park their cars, which prompted the creation of parking lots. With 23 million cars in America, parking became a serious issue and city officials turned to engineers to invent a solution which resulted in the first parking lots4.
At the beginning, parking lots were designed with diagonal bays to accommodate the fairly large automobiles and to allow for ease of parking2. Early automobiles were also not as weather resistant compared to the automobiles of today3 and so had to be designed with weather protection in mind. High-rise, fully enclosed parking garages were built to accommodate the larger volumes and to protect these vehicles from the elements. Innovations such as the “D’Humy ramp system”, which created split-level floors to maximize spaces, were incorporated into the high-rise buildings3.
Vehicles were parked by professional valets…
By Danielle Desjardins
One of the greatest environmental challenges our cities face today lies in mobility. The economic and social fabric of urban environments are closely intertwined with networks of vehicles and transportation systems that leave their mark: around one-quarter of global CO2 emissions come from the transportation of people and goods.
How should the parking industry adapt to a future in which major cities may deploy various strategies meant to diminish the number of private vehicles on their main thoroughfares, thus diminishing the need for parking spaces?
If you commuted to work by car in Montreal or Toronto in 2017, chances are you spent the equivalent of a normal work week being stuck in traffic. According to the Inrix Traffic Scorecard Rank1, commuters from these cities wasted respectively 50 and 47 hours being in a car immobilized by congestion.
As the population grows and more people move into urban areas, overwhelmingly choosing the suburbs over downtowns, traffic jams worsen and commuting to work becomes a never-ending nightmare. Hence a growing trend in major cities to implement various strategies and impose new rules to ease the gridlock and get people moving again.
For instance, many cities are banning cars from their centers: Oslo has pledged to do it by 2019, Madrid wants to do it in 2020, while cities like Rome, Dusseldorf and Stuttgart are planning to ban diesel cars in the near future.2 Other cities, like London, plan to create streets and street networks that encourage walking, cycling and public transport use in order to reduce car dependency3. Add this to other recent developments, like the proliferation of ride-sharing and car-sharing services and the advent of driverless cars getting people to work and returning home to park4, and you have the perfect storm for a decline in demand for parking garage services.
