EVER INCREASING number of cars and the perennial shortage of parking space is a problem that plagues all cities.

While policies focus on how to increase public transportation, reduce the number of car trips and price parking, innovators have taken the technology route to address the problem in a different way.

Three streams of innovation are put forth to make parking intelligent and efficient. One looks at car parking management using equipment like sensors, state-of-the-art computer algorithms that work in tandem with mobile technology.

Automated products

The other is about automated parking products. The third stream is like the ones pursued at the Media lab, MIT, Massachusetts. There is a serious rethinking about the future of car design.

What is now proposed is a flexible car that can be literally stacked than actually parked.

Parkingcarma is a California based company that has come up with an integrated car parking management system. It first pools information about all the parking lots that are available in an area.

Users in need

Apart from dedicated commercial parking spaces, it encourages companies that have underused parking spaces to share them with the users in need.

A well-developed network of information is available to the user through the mobile phone, Internet or other automobile devices.

A person who approaches a busy commercial area can know the location and availability of parking lots in real time and also reserve the parking space if needed.

The systems can be enhanced with the help of sensors, which can pick the information of cars leaving the parking lot and update the database.

The thrust of this system is to integrate car spaces in an area and avoid cars circling in search of car space.

The idea to pool unused car-spaces is a useful and even low cost technologies can help one to use the information and optimise car spaces.

Urban Parking Concepts, a company based in the U.S., uses a patented technology to design an automated secure parking system. The car parking space is in the shape of a tower and at each level of the parking floor is a circulating carousel.

Lift for cars

Cars that drive in to park are lifted up in a platform along a vertical core and slide into empty car slots.

There is more than one vertical moving platform at any given time. A turntable rotates the car by 180 degrees so that the exit is always a `forward driving exit'.

The rotating car park carousel also helps in quick retrieval. The central vertical core can cater to more than one concentric ring of parking lots.

The company claims that simple systems require only about 30 seconds on average for in or out parking. While systems with double multiple carousels take about 9 seconds. MIT Media lab along with General motors is designing `The City Car' that can be used in dense urban areas. This is a stackable car for two passengers and utilises fully integrated in-wheel electric motors and suspension systems called, `Wheel Robots.'

Welcome technology

This technology eliminates the traditional engine blocks and gearboxes since they are self-contained and digitally controlled. The wheel robot provides 360 degrees of movement and allows parking by sideways translation.

As a result, the users can easily manoeuvre in congested urban spaces and park conveniently and tightly. The cars are parked as vertical stacks. The vertical stacks operate like the luggage carts in airports.

The city cars will be stacked in a compact manner and users simply take the vehicle at the front of the stack and use them. The city car is a new vehicle types that works in tandem with the existing urban infrastructure.

Increased mobility

They increase mobility and innovatively address parking issues. The car is scheduled for final show by the end of 2006.

Many Indian cities are planning multilevel car parking towers. A simple stacking of floors with parking lots will not suffice.

What is required is an integration of parking sites, an effective management and an improved turnover of car park space. Certainly the solution to innovative car parking cannot only be technologically determined. It needs to be dovetailed with the transport policies, but innovative design can improve efficient use of land.

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