MIAMI BEACH — It
seemed like the perfect night life accessory for the South Beach set — an
automated robotic parking garage where trendy clubgoers could park their
Porsches with a futuristic touch of a button.
Forget hiding
your GPS and favorite Fendi sunglasses from a valet. This garage would park
cars itself. Instead, cars were smashed, and faulty machinery fell several
stories to the ground. Sometimes vehicles were stuck for so long that garage
operators had to pay for customers’ taxis.
“It was clear
that the garage was not ready to be open to the public,” said Russell Galbut,
the managing principal at Crescent Heights, the property developer.
The garage on
Collins Avenue is one of two cutting-edge parking projects in South Florida
that ended in spectacular debacles. At Brickell House, a luxury residential
high-rise in downtown Miami, a $16 million robotic garage plagued with delays
finally closed, leaving tenants paying $28 a day to park elsewhere.
High-tech parking
is common in Europe, in the Middle East and elsewhere in Asia, where space
limitations made it a priority. But in the United States, errors were common
because drivers were unaccustomed to the technology, and some garage builders
tried to duplicate foreign successes without understanding how differences in
design can make or break a project.
Some smaller
garages work fine, but others designed to whiz automobiles away and return them
in three minutes or less are bringing back the wrong cars, trapping vehicles,
taking what feels like forever and even damaging automobiles.
The company that
built the two unsuccessful South Florida garages, Boomerang Systems, declared
bankruptcy this summer and last week announced that the company will voluntarily
liquidate its assets.
In Hoboken, N.J.,
where the country’s first robotic garage was built over a decade ago, a
Cadillac plunged six stories, and a Jeep dropped four stories a year later. One of the country’s largest automated parking
garages, in Maryland, is now closed after an employee fell to his death in an
accident that led to more than $1 million in required repairs.
“On the weekends,
it usually takes 45 minutes to an hour to get your car,” said Aldo Ferri, 36,
an Audi driver who rents an apartment at Brickell House, a building that looks
out on Biscayne Bay. “You can only have X number of cars delivered versus
requested. If the numbers go high, the system goes crazy.”
After months of
problems, the condominium association was forced to hire old-fashioned valets
to park cars for people who needed them quickly. This month, the feud with the
garage builder deteriorated further and access to the garage was blocked off.
“I’m going to
move out,” Mr. Ferri said.
The building
developer, Harvey Hernandez, and Boomerang Services did not respond to requests
for comment. According to Boomerang’s website, the company has seven robotic
parking projects. The website does not mention the Collins Avenue garage, built
for 139 cars, which has sat unused for five years.
Even with repairs,
test runs show the Collins Avenue garage takes about seven minutes to retrieve
cars. It is supposed to take three. Instead of turning around 60 cars an hour,
the garage can handle only 16, the company said.
Drivers generate
many of the delays by doing things like walking away without pushing a button
to tell the garage to park their car, which jams the system for everyone else.
Despite the
setbacks, parking industry experts say automated parking is here to stay.
“It’s unfortunate
that you’ve got projects that haven’t happened the way that they were supposed
to, because it gives the entire industry a black eye when it shouldn’t, because
automated parking is a wave of parking for the future,” said Christopher Alan,
whose company, Auto Parkit, has seven such garages and 20 more under
construction, mostly in California. “You don’t have a lot companies that are
doing this. A few do it very well.”
Mr. Alan said his
key to success was designing simpler technology, which allowed him to park 200
cars where a traditional garage can fit 100.
Another South
Florida developer, Gil Dezer, said his new high-rise in Sunny Isles, the
Porsche Design Tower, will feature an automated garage that will deliver a car
right to a resident’s door.
“Ours is an
elevator,” Mr. Dezer said. “An elevator goes up and down. We know how to use an
elevator. Elevators move people. In robotic parking, those elevators move cars.
Whether it’s now or two or three decades from now, we need to continue to
pursue it and hone that innovation.”
photo: Yeong-Ung Yang for The New York Times
