Многоэтажные парковки: история и современные технологии.

Building designed for car parking

A multistorey car park (Commonwealth English) or parking garage (American English parking building, parking structure, parkade (mainly Canadian), parking ramp, parking deck, or indoor parking, is a building designed for car, motorcycle, and bicycle parking in which parking takes place on more than one floor or level. The first known multistorey facility was built in London in 1901, and the first underground parking was built in Barcelona in 1904. (See History, below.) Some cities such as London have abolished previously enacted minimum parking requirements. Minimum parking requirements are a hallmark of zoning and planning codes for municipalities in the US. (States do not prescribe parking requirements, while counties and cities can).

The earliest known multi storey car park was opened in May 1901 by City & Suburban Electric Carriage Company at 6 Denman Street, central London. The location had space for 100 vehicles over seven floors, totaling 19,000 square feet. The same company opened a second location in 1902 for 230 vehicles. The company specialized in the sale, storage, valeting, and on demand delivery of electric vehicles that could travel about 40 miles and had a top speed of 20 miles per hour. The earliest known parking garage in the United States was built in 1918 for the Hotel La Salle at 215 West Washington Street in the West Loop area of downtown Chicago, Illinois. It was designed by Holabird and Roche. The Hotel La Salle was demolished in 1976, but the parking structure remained because it had been designated as preliminary landmark status and the structure was several blocks from the hotel. It was demolished in 2005 after failing to receive landmark status from the city of Chicago. A 49 storey apartment tower, 215 West, has taken its place, also featuring a parking garage. When the Capital Garage in Washington, D. C. was built in 1927, it was reportedly the largest parking structure of its kind in the country. It was imploded in 1974.

As multi storey car parks have become more common since the middle of the twentieth century, many constructions of such structures have been using precast concrete to reduce the construction time. The design involves putting parking structure parts together. The parts of precast concrete include multi storey structural wall panels, interior and exterior columns, structural floors, girders, wall panels, stairs, and slabs. The precast concrete parts are transported using flatbed semi trailers to the sites. The structural floor modules may need to be laid tilted during the transportation in order to cover as large floor area as possible while they can be easily transported on the roadways. The modules are lifted using precast concrete lifting anchor systems at the sites for assembly. Decorations may include using of covers to close the holes in the precast concrete that contains the lifting anchors, and installing facades to the exterior of the structures. In modern construction of the precast modules, there are other features to improve the strength of the structure. An example is to use prestressed strands on post tensioned concrete for the construction of the shear walls. Another example is the use of carbon fiber reinforced polymer to replace steel wire mesh to lighten the load and yield more corrosion resistant especially for the cold climate areas which use salt for melting snow.

Modern car parks utilize a variety of technologies to help motorists find unoccupied parking spaces, car location when returning to the vehicle and improve their experience. These include adaptive lighting, sensors and parking space LED indicators (red for occupied, green for available and blue is reserved for the disabled; above every parking space), indoor positioning system (IPS), including QR code, and mobile payment options. The Santa Monica Place shopping mall in California has cameras on each stall that can help count the lot occupancy and find lost cars. Online booking technology service providers have been created to help drivers find long term parking in an automated manner, while also providing significant savings for those who book parking spaces ahead of time. They use real time inventory management checking technology to display car parks with availability, sorted by price and distance from the airport. Other recent developments in technology include Vehicles Detection and Count Systems, Point of Sale & Revenue Control Systems, Traffic & Capacity Monitoring Systems, Valet Parking Point of Sale, Management & Revenue Control Systems. These systems help in way finding for parking clients with space availability shown at every turn, space monitoring using retrofit wifi transmitters in each space to update the space availability signs and to alert parking management of bottle necks and intervention measures. Revenue Control, Capacity Management, and Valet Point of Sale is a major issue for Office and Retail parking management and is also a means of parking management intervention, where website update the status of all of these issues for exclusive use by management. Irvine Spectrum Center, Irvine CA, with 3 parking structures, uses all of these systems The City of Santa Monica uses Traffic and Capacity Monitoring with its 30 parking structures. Disneyland, in Anaheim CA uses most of these hi tech solutions on its 8 garages.

In 1991, a 1975 marine vessel was transformed into a floating pontoon multi storey car parking facility. The ship was given the new name P Arken (a pun on the words park and ark) and it is permanently towed in Gothenburg's harbour Lilla Bommen near Skeppsbron. In November 2019, a fully clad parking barge for automobiles was patented in the United States. Its angular sides are designed to protect against driving wind, rain, and debris.

In October 2009, the National Building Museum opened an exhibition solely devoted to the study of parking garages and their impact on the built environment. This exhibition, titled House of Cars: Innovation and the Parking Garage, was on view until 11 July 2010. Additional information on the design and building of parking structures can be found in "Parking Structures: planning, design, construction, maintenance, and repair" This resource is on its third edition, written by prominent staff of Walker Parking Consultants, a preeminent Parking Structure designer in the US.