Parking in the Sky

by WILLIAM ZECKENDORF

THE automobile has probably clone more to change the American way of life than any other single thing except electricity. Consider what has happened 1o the American scene — how both the geography and the economy of the nation have been altered by the highways necessitated by the automobile. But a point has been reached where Detroit’s product has become a destructive force, and the automobile industry should furnish the leadership in solving the serious economic and social problems which the automobile has created in the nation’s cities. Let me add that the oil industry should join with the automobile industry in finding the necessary solutions.

Now I am deeply interested in cities and suburbs and the struggle for existence going on between them. I can consider only one phase of the problem here: the effect of traffic and parking — or the lack of parking — on the central core of cities.

Let me quote from the current General Motors let ter-writing contest in which GM is giving $200,000 for essays on the subject of highways — with scarcely any mention of parking. They state that more than half of the road travel is in the cities. What about the cities? Are the city highways a way to gel out ? Are they a way to gel in?

The existing congestion that makes parking facilities essential comes from the fact that you have vortical buildings packed full of human beings. You have tall buildings because the land economics dictate that they be tall — a low building cannot absorb the high land cost. The would-be parker demands convenience to his car: he will not park in a remote place. It has been discovered that the outer range, the extreme range of walking to the parking place, is about 1000 feet. A man would rather get a ticket for parking than walk farther.

I contend that you cannot solve this problem horizontally in central city areas. You can get a palliative, a half solution to the problem, but the only real solution to the critical downtown parking problem in the central city is a vertical solution. And a vertical solution means a mechanized solution. It does not mean a ramp garage. A ramp garage is old-fashioned and illogical; the Pharaohs used it to build the Pyramids. I don’t mean you cannot have ramp garages in special situations. But it is not the over-all solution to the downtown problem.

The genius available in Detroit for mechanical thinking, if turned on this problem, could figure a way in short order to store cars automatically in vertical buildings and recapture them without human labor — to take cars in and put them away very much as an IBM machine files cards and recaptures them. You will then find that the vertical garage can compete without subsidy for high-cost land, because the garage business is a very good business. The revenue potential of a garage is as high as in almost any investment known, including office buildings.

In Detroit, the greatest mechanically-minded city in the world, the municipal government has a ramp garage solution to a vertical problem. Why? General Motors stock earned over one billion dollars before taxes Iasi year. What better investment could they have than a research project in mechanized automobile parking for the downtown area?

I am aware that it is always easy to talk about spending the other fellow’s money. But I may say our firm, which doesn’t compare in size with the mammoth concerns in Detroit, has spent in research on the mechanized parking problem more than $500,000.

Briefly, our interests centered in two devices, one vertical, one horizontal. With the first, we got as far as a one-ton operating model about nine feet high, six feet wide, and twelve feet long — fully automatic—in which you drove your car onto a dolly, which was then carried transversely to the elevator, pushed on, taken up, pulled off, and parked. Jn deparking, the car on its dolly was picked up and carried over the tops of cars parked bumper to bumper and fender to fender and taken down. The second device was British, and we had the rights to exploit it throughout the Western Hemisphere. This was a horizontal, full-scale device powered by ordinary motors you could get anywhere. We operated it with cars on it on the ground floor of one of our buildings. For various reasons these devices did not work out. But we keep trying.

It is high time that the inventive genius of Detroit should give to the parking of the automobile the same kind of thinking that was used in building the automobile. That is step one. Step two brings in the municipal government, the planners, the traffic engineers. The moment you have built a vertical garage that will take, let’s say, 5000 automobiles and will discharge each car in a matter of minutes, you have created a traffic problem at the street level.

Everybody is purposely avoiding this aspect, for it seems too big to handle. We know subconsciously that it means a terrible job and a tremendous expenditure to redesign cities to take care of the problem. However, we have to make up our minds either to redesign the cities to cope with the situation, or to eliminate the use of cars in the cities — one or the other. It is just a question of which is the more expensive. If you do nothing, it is going to be very expensive because there is only one thing that happens by itself, and that is economic disaster.

We must redesign certain major central city areas. It means directing great highways into the mechanized parking facilities. It means an extension at the municipal level of the police power, the zoning power, the power to condemn and to cooperate with private enterprise for redevelopment. And you have to give more force, more encouragement, to that lev el of your city gov ernment so that it can condemn. It means ihe creation of great highways and thruways that will coincide with these garage developments and take care of concentrated deliveries and discharges of automobiles. It means you’ve got to change the street pattern — not completely, but at the critical points. If you don’t, you’re licked. In short, the final answer is not a garage under a park, but a complete new “look-see” at the city plant: the way you wish it to function and what you want it to look like in the future.

There are in existence about half a dozen automatic parking garage devices. There have been dozens of Rube Goldberg conceptions — all part of the thing called growth. There is the Pigeonhole crane-elevator in Los Angeles and Phoenix, the Park-O-Mat in Washington, and the Akroll device in Houston. All are mechanical, the last being a means, applicable to exisling types of olevalors and cranes, of getting the car off and on the hoisting device in a matter of seconds — obviously a crucial part of any mechanized operation. The first two involve a building unit — a special building capable of parking cars on either side of the hoisting device.

I recently saw a very interesting new device that we are thinking of taking on ourselves. Our company is working closely with the Otis Elevator Company in the hope of being able to find a solution — we to handle the real estate and design and real-estate economies, they the lifting problem. Although there is no existing device that fully answers the problem, there are several that have made real strides, are actually paying, and are being franchised, but they arc not nearly broad enough or big enough. As a matter of fact, if they were they would he almost useless at this moment because the streets couldn’t handle them. It is not merely a question of how to get cars up and dow n fast. The cities must redesign themselves to take care of the peak loads of cars as t hey come and go.

We feel that it is perfectly sound financially to use land with high assessment value in the downtown areas of our cities for parking facilities. The economics of a garage that we now have on the drafting board — it is a 35-story affair — indicale that if the streets can take care of ihe traffic, this garage can compete with the highest productive improvement for the most expensive downtown land, and will justify paying the full price for it, without tax subsidy or any boondoggling or anything else. It doesn’t matter whether the land is assessed at $2000 a front foot, $10,000 a front foot, or $15,000 a front foot, because the very fact of the existence of those kinds of values indicates also the existence of that kind of demand for parking, and of customers. If you don’t have the customers, you don’t have those values. And if you don’t have those values, you don’t have the customers.

I positively believe these projects should be built and operated with private capital. I have said that I thought that there was a point of merger between the municipal government level and private capital; but the moment the municipal government has done the things that I have indicated, I think it should abandon the project to private capital operation and to private capital investment.

To summarize, let me say that I recommend taller buildings rather than more lot coverage; by the same token, vertical garages, not horizontal ones. And by vertical garages I mean mechanical garages. Mechanical garages demand high-speed streets. High-speed streets require a new type of city. A new type of city means the survival of the city against the suburb, without loss to either one.