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A multi-storey car park or a parking garage is a building (or part thereof) which is designed specifically to be for automobile parking and where there are a number of floors or levels on which parking takes place. It is essentially a stacked car park.

Contents 1 Nomenclature 2 First multi-storey car park 3 Design 4 Automated parking 5 See also 6 References 7 Further reading 8 External links

The term "multi-storey car park" is used in the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, Singapore and many Commonwealth of Nations countries. In the western United States, the term "parking structure" is used, especially when it is necessary to distinguish such a structure from the "garage" in a house or an automobile service station. In some places in North America, "parking garage" refers only to an indoor, often underground structure – outdoor multi-level parking facilities are referred to by a number of regional terms:

• parking structure is used in the western United States and by civil engineers;
• parking deck is used in the southeast;
• parkade is used in Canadian English; it is a portmanteau of parking and arcade;
• parking ramp is used in the upper Midwest, especially Minnesota and Wisconsin, and has been observed as far east as Toledo, Ohio and Buffalo, New York.

Architects and civil engineers are likely to call it a parking structure instead, since their work is all about various structures, and that term is the vernacular in some of the western United States. When attached to a high-rise of another use, it is sometimes called a parking podium. In the United States building codes use the term open parking structure to refer to a structure designed for car storage (not repair) that has enough openings in the walls that it does not need mechanical ventilation or fire sprinklers, as opposed to a "parking garage" that requires mechanical ventilation or sprinklers but does not require openings in the walls. The openings provide fresh air flow to disperse either car exhaust or fumes from a fire should one break out within the structure.

The earliest known multi-storey car park was built in 1918. It was built for the Hotel La Salle in Chicago, IL at 215 West Washington Street in the West Loop area of downtown. It was designed by Holabird and Roche.^[1] The Hotel La Salle was demolished in 1976, but the parking structure remained because it had been designated as preliminary landmark status.^[2] The Hotel LaSalle multi-storey was demolished in 2005 after failing to receive landmark status from the city of Chicago.^[3] Jupiter Realty Corp. of Chicago is constructing a 49-storey apartment tower in its place,^[4] with construction to begin in September 2007.

In the 1920s an English cartoon imagined a very laughable thing for that time: an hotel for cars; he drew a multi-storey car park.^[5]

Movement of vehicles between floors can be effected by:

• interior ramps - the most common type
• exterior ramps - which may take the form of a circular ramp (colloquially known as a 'whirley-gig' in America)
• vehicle lifts - the least common

In locations where the car park is built on sloping land, the car park may be split-level.

Many car parks are independent buildings that are dedicated exclusively to that use. The design loads for car parks are often less than the office building they serve (50 psf versus 80 psf), leading to long floor spans of 55-60 feet that permit cars to park in rows without supporting columns in between. The most common structural systems in the United States for these structures are either prestressed concrete concrete double tee floor systems or post-tensioned cast-in-place concrete floor systems. In recent times, car parks built to serve residential and some business properties are built as part of a larger building, and often are built underground as part of the basement.

Car parks which serve shopping centres can sometimes be built adjacent to the shopping centre so as to effect easier access at each floor between shops and parking. One example is the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, USA, which has two large car parks attached to the building at the eastern and western ends of the mall. Another common position for car parks within shopping centres in the UK is on the roof, around the various utility systems, enabling customers to take lifts straight down into the centre. Examples of such are The Oracle in Reading and Festival Place in Basingstoke.

Automatic multi-storey car parks provide lower building cost per parking slot, as they typically requires less building volume and less ground area than a conventional facility with the same capacity. However, the cost of the mechanical equipment within the building that is needed to transport cars internally needs to be added to the lower building cost to determine the total costs. Other costs are usually lower too, for example there is no need for an energy intensive ventilating system, since cars are not driven inside and human cashiers or security personnel may not be needed.

Automated car parks rely on similar technology that is used for mechanical handling and document retrieval. The driver leaves the car in an entrance module. It is then transported to a parking slot by a robot trolley. For the driver, the process of parking is reduced to leaving the car inside an entrance module.

At peak periods a wait may be involved before entering or leaving. The wait is due to the fact that loading passengers and luggage occurs at the entrance and exit location rather than at the parked stall. This loading blocks the entrance or exit from being available to others. Whether the retrieval of vehicles is faster in an automatic car park or a self park car park depends on the layout and number of exits.

• Auto stacker
• Car condo
• Trinity Centre Multi-Storey Car Park
• Parking Guidance and Information

1. ^ http://www.asphaltnation.com/Articles/parking.html
2. ^ http://www.nationaltrust.org/magazine/archives/arch_story/102105.htm
3. ^ http://www.preservationchicago.org/risk/lasalle.html
4. ^ http://chicagobusiness.com/cgi-bin/news.pl?id=24357
5. ^ Daniele Luttazzi Lepidezze postribolari (2007, Feltrinelli, p.275) (Italian)

• A brief history of parking (HTML). Retrieved on 2007-02-22.
• Mary Beth Klatt (21). Car culture (HTML) (English). Preservation Online 1. National Trust for Historic Preservation. Retrieved on 2007-02-22.

• "Munich Automated Underground Parking System, Germany", Roadtraffic technology
• Robotic parking technology