Here at Harding Steel, we’re committed to providing you with innovative parking solutions for your properties and facilities. Whether you run or are planning the construction of hospitals, hotels, college campuses, general commercial buildings, or car dealerships, our products can help you with a number of common parking-related issues. Many of our most impressive parking systems are automatic, which puts them a step above the regular, unmoving parking lots and parking garages that you’re used to. We’ll answer some automatic parking system frequently asked questions in this post to show how they can aid you.
What Is an Automatic Parking System?
Let’s begin by defining what an automatic parking system is. In the broad sense, an automatic parking system is an integration of a parking area with moving parts and computer software that directs those parts. Such a system has the ability to change the position of vehicles through a number of means, including chains, hydraulics, shuttles platforms and rail paths, and vertical elevator-like lifts. The idea behind automatic car parking systems is quite similar to automated systems that people use in the manufacturing industry, as they store automobiles neatly and efficiently without much direct human intervention.
What’s the Difference Between Mechanical and Automatic Systems?
When looking through options for parking solutions, you’ll probably come across mechanical systems and automatic systems. At first, these may seem synonymous, but they actually have distinct characteristics that set them apart. The main thing that defines a mechanical parking system is that a person must operate it for it to move. Usually, mechanical systems appear in the form of parking lifts. These can raise cars directly up on platforms to allow more than one car to park in a given horizontal space. To raise and lower their platforms, though, a trained individual must control them. Also, the lower cars usually need to removed before lowering the top vehicles—therefore, they aren’t automatic.
Automatic systems are ones that have some degree of functionality that can activate without the direct manipulation of a person. Rather, their computer systems are able to move cars on their own in ways that allow them to accommodate people’s requests to store and retrieve vehicles. Automatic systems can thus have more complex arrangements than simple vertical stacks.
What’s the Difference Between Semi-Automated and Fully Automated?
Under the umbrella of automatic car parking systems exist semi-automated and fully-automated systems. This is another important distinction to be aware of when looking into implementing automated parking for your building.
Semi-Automated Parking Systems
Semi-automatic parking systems are named so because they require people to drive their cars into available spaces, and also drive them out when they’re leaving. However, once a vehicle is in a space and the driver has exited it, a semi-automated system can move that car by moving cars up-down and left-right to its spaces. This allows it to move occupied platforms upwards to a suspended level above the ground while bringing open platforms down where drivers can reach them. In the same way, when a vehicle owner returns and identifies themselves, the system can rotate again and bring down that person’s car so that they can leave. Semi-automatic systems are easy to install within existing parking structures as well, and are generally smaller than their fully automated counterparts.
Fully Automated Parking Systems
Fully automatic parking systems, on the other hand, do just about all the work of storing and retrieving cars on behalf of users. A driver will only see an entrance area where they position their car over a platform. Once they align their vehicle and exit from it, a fully automated system will move that platform into its storage space. This space is inaccessible to drivers and usually resembles shelves. The system will locate open spots among its shelves and move cars into them. When a driver returns for their vehicle, it will know where to find their car and will bring it back out so that they may leave. Due to how fully automated parking systems operate, they stand apart as their own large parking structures. You wouldn’t add one into a section of an already standing parking garage like you might with a semi-automatic system. Still, both semi- and fully automated systems can come in various formations to fit into your specific property seamlessly.
What Are the Advantages of Automatic Parking Systems?
Even after understanding automatic parking systems a bit more, you may still wonder what advantages automatic car parking systems offer over traditional parking layouts. Indeed, all these innovative details would mean nothing if they didn’t serve an important need. Here are a couple of their major benefits.
Space Efficiency
The primary goal of both semi-automatic and fully automatic parking systems is to maximize space efficiency on a property. Unfortunately, it’s common for buildings to struggle to provide enough parking spaces for the people that visit and work within them each day. They could face limitations because of the limited availability of land around them. This is especially true in urban environments. Simultaneously, many cities institute parking space minimums on construction projects that require a certain number of spots corresponding to a building’s square footage. This can seriously hamper projects because designers must devote such a large proportion of a property to parking.
Automatic parking systems help people overcome these hurdles by storing cars more densely within a parking area. Semi-automatic systems unlock access to vertical spaces above the ground within individual levels of a parking garage that would normally go untouched. In this way, they can double the number of cars that a parking area can hold. Fully automated systems take this a step further by utilizing their shelves, which hold vehicles very compactly. The fact that they can move cars with moving platforms means that they don’t need to set aside space for driving and walking aisles and ramps. In turn, they can devote more space to vehicles.
Convenience
Parking can be a source of frustration for people when they can’t find an available spot and must drive around after arriving. A layout that makes it harder for people to park their cars near corresponding buildings is also a problem for plenty of large properties. Automatic parking systems provide ways to solve these issues. Since they store cars in more condensed configurations, a lack of spots becomes a far less frequent dilemma. People also don’t need to walk long stretches to reach their vehicles. The experience drivers have when coming to and leaving a building that uses automatic parking is consequently much smoother and swifter.
As you can see, automatic parking systems are adaptable to a wide array of places and fulfill highly critical needs for properties. If you have more questions that we didn’t cover in our automatic parking system frequently asked questions, contact Harding Steel today.
