On a 100-by-100 foot lot in Hoboken, New Jersey, stands a parking garage that's only slightly taller than a four-story rowhouse, yet which holds, 324 vehicles-more than three times the number that would fit into a conventional parking ramp of that size. For Hoboken, a city with nearly 30,000 people per square mile and with few off-street parking spaces, the new Garden Street Garage is a blessing. The question is whether the New Jersey city's new garage foretells the urban future.

The Garden Street Garage differs from 99.99 percent of America's parking structures in that it is fully automated. You drive into an entrance bay, leave the vehicle on a steel pallet, swipe a card in front of a magnetic reader, and the car is whisked away into the building's interior. Come back hours or days later, and the car is automatically delivered to you. There's no need for you to drive through, searching for an open space. Nor does the garage owner need to hire attendants to park and retrieve vehicles. Computer-controlled machinery runs the entire process.

Gerhard Haag, president of Robotic Parking in Pinellas Park, Florida, thinks American cities are on the cusp of constructing many automated garages. The US contains 206 million vehicles, he points out. As more people relocate to dense urban settings, it will become imperative to park vehicles more compactly. His firm designed the Garden Street Garage, which squeezes seven levels of parking into a building just 56 feet high. The building's height, vertical proportions, and brick exterior allow it to fit with the old rowhouses on its block. Because the garage contains no ramps or aisles and has minimal headroom, it uses expensive urban space much more efficiently than a conventional garage or parking deck.

In Hoboken, the cost, excluding land, was $19,500 per parking space, Haag says. Depending on the size and location elsewhere in the US, "cost would range from $10,000 to $30,000 per parking space," he estimates. Generally, an automated garage cost more per parking spot than a conventional garage.

Although the parking in the Hoboken garage is entirely above ground, automated garages can also be built below ground. Haag say use of underground garages in the US has declined dramatically in the past 20 years because people find them scary. Automated garages eliminate the discomfort, he says, since motorists do no go beyond the entrance. An electro-mechanical system with computerized controls stores the cars on pallets and retrieves them quickly. At the Hoboken garage, which opened in October 2002 and is operated by Robotic Parking, under a contract with the Hoboken Parking Utility, the average wait is 2.5 minutes.

Darius Sollonhub, who teaches infrastructure planning at New Jersey Institute of Technology, says automated garages "are fairly common in Europe" and are also numerous in Japan. In US cities possessing Hoboken's traits - a high population density combined with high automobile ownership - automated garages may be financially feasible, Sollonhub believes. The primary obstacle, he says, "is just the general concern about new technology."

From an urbanistic perspective, automated garages have numerous advantages: In addition to conserving land, they don't emit fumes or generate much noise, since there's no driving in their interiors. They don't require windows and or much interior lighting, and therefore are not brightly illuminated empty hulks, the way conventional garages are at night. The exterior of an automated garage is apt to be lifeless, but at least it can be designed to resemble neighboring buildings. Retail could occupy some of the ground-level street frontage.


Automated pallets stack cars in their places . The exit looks like a normal. (see photos above)

Gerhard Haag has been discussing proposals for building automated garages in New York, Miami, Boston, and elsewhere. The company's web site is www.roboticparking.com.