Very High Tech - Elevator Garages in an NYC Hi-Rise

theodp writes "If the hassle of getting groceries from the parking garage to your 12th floor condo has been holding you back from buying a deluxe apartment in the sky, wait no more. Wired reports on the En-Suite Sky Garages at 200 Eleventh Avenue (Flash) in Chelsea, where an 8,000-pound-capacity freight elevator will whisk your Bentley directly into your pad. The convenience doesn't come cheap — a garage-equipped 2BR starts at $4.7M."

Cheaper than parking on the street

[jihadist]

New York parking prices are insane and with all the traffic, it's cheaper and faster to bicycle through the freezing snow and angry muggers. Maybe that will eventually make it a "green" city.

Described in 1970 Heinlein Book

[GoSmalltalk]

This was described fully in Heinlein's "I will Fear No Evil". While the book wasn't exactly great Heinlein, it does describe apartment buildings with elevators for your cars. They are needed because in that worldview, crime was so rampant that your car was an upolstered tank, and your home was a fortress. Happily, that particularly dark vision has yet to come. However, it was written in the years of "burn, baby, burn" and very high crime, so it is certainly fodder for speculative fiction.

Groceries

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to live on the 23rd floor of a high-rise in Chicago. Groceries were never a problem. The 1st floor of the building was a grocery store and they delivered with purchases of $20 or more (excluding alcohol and cigarettes). Likewise all the local grocery stores would deliver to your apartment free of charge with a minimum purchase. You could phone or fax your grocery order in and pay for it on delivery (even pay with a check) or you could go down and select your items, pay for them, and one of the box boys would lug the stuff up for you.

It would've been possible for a hermit to never leave the building. The local laundry picked up and delivered for free. The drug store would deliver prescriptions for free. And we had a full gym with half-Olympic pool on the 5th floor. There was even a dog-walk service available for a small fee. That's how things work in inner cities.

Re:Cheaper than parking on the street

[jawtheshark]

Too many cars isn't going to result in less cars. High gas prices, on the other hand, might

Perhaps, but only perhaps. Over here in Europe (assuming you're American, sorry) gas prices are already very high. Filling up my car is a good 70€ these days, and I live in one of the "cheaper" countries in Europe.

Yet, every morning, there is a steel queue in direction of the closest city. All going to work. It's 8:15 now. Would I leave for work now, getting to my workplace, would take about 35 to 40 minutes. Leaving in an hour or so, will cut that back to 15 minutes or less. Parking is no problem for me, my workplace provides those. Others are less lucky and easily pay 15€ or more a day.

Of course, I'm one of the bad guys in the game too. My workplace is 10km from here, I have a bicycle road practially from my home to my workplace. I used it a few times in the summer. It's fun, but you get at work completely sweaty (it's a hilly country and most of the time I'm going uphill). There are no showers at my workplace, and you see where I'm going. :-(

Public transportation you say? Takes ~50 minutes. 25 minutes walking to the train station, 10minutes train, waiting for the bus another 5 minutes, the bus standing in traffic 10 minutes. That's of course when I'm lucky and don't miss a train or a bus. Yes, I also did this before.

So, just jacking up the gas prices won't help much. From my point of view the time saved is worth the price, so unless gas prices become unaffordable for the common man, nothing will change.

Re:Elevator Garage?

[Rudisaurus]

Re modding up -- that's sadly true; they already have. :)

GP beat me to it. But just to put things in perspective, the energy required to lift your 1000 kg car once is roughly equivalent to leaving a 100 W light bulb lit for 81 mins. Surprisingly modest, actually.

Cheers, Rudi

Re:one at a time please!

[jawtheshark]

Very funny, but I suspect this thing is going to be controlled with a keycard coded to your aparment. Insert keycard, you and your car go to the parking, you leave car, open door and you're in your hallway. So, no button-pushing pranksters, I fear.

Re:Cheaper than parking on the street

[nospam007]

Of course, I'm one of the bad guys in the game too. My workplace is 10km from here, I have a bicycle road practially from my home to my workplace. I used it a few times in the summer. It's fun, but you get at work completely sweaty (it's a hilly country and most of the time I'm going uphill). There are no showers at my workplace, and you see where I'm going. :-(
___

Get an elektrobike, that's what I did. It's exactly for that, no sweat. It 'removes' the hills from your road, it's like biking _down_ the hill.

Similar building in Berlin

[Anonymous Coward]

This has already been done in Germany, and the whole building revolves around the concept of the garage: http://www.carloft.de/ [carloft.de]

Re:Cheaper than parking on the street

[CharlieG]

Until your job makes you lock your scooter/bicycle outside, and it gets stolen on week 2. Been a major problem where I work. I know a few people who rode for a while - all gave up when their bicycle got stolen. That said, of the 3, one now walks or roller blades (He lives that close) and the other 2 are taking mass transit.

Me? I've taken mass transit for 10 years, but next month will drive, because my MD said "The standing on the train and subway is hurting your leg - either drive, or stay home" (I have a leg wound, and standing, for even 20 minutes a day is causeing serious health issues - I've been out of work, in bed for 2 weeks to keep it elevated (restricted to bed) - and will be for another 2 weeks. I know I'll actually be glad to get back to Mass transit in December

Re:Cheaper than parking on the street

[moosesocks]

Obligatory hair-raising video [youtube.com] of a helmet-mounted cam of a guy riding from Central Park down to the southern tip of Manhattan. He's got nerves of steel.

Also, buy a really strong lock [youtube.com].

Alternatively, NYC's got arguably one of the cheapest and most extensive mass-transit system on the planet. Owning a car in the city is just plain dumb unless you need to cart around big heavy items all the time.

Energy Efficiencies

[Doc Ruby]

Raising and lowering all those cars probably would consume a lot of energy. While the address uses Con Edison, one of the most expensive utilities in the country.

However, if the elevators used regenerative braking, they wouldn't consume much energy at all. Lowering the cars could charge a battery that raises the next car. Such efficient tech could be applied to all NYC's many elevators, even at lower loads per trip, if it became cheap, reliable and maintainable. Overall the energy saved could be very large.

In the meantime, Americans will proceed to evolve to a point where we never leave our cars. We'll need the wheels just to drive around the batteries for all our mobile devices. Especially as we'll need to stay inside a generated mediasphere all the time, rather than face the ugly reality of a world we've twisted around that growing consumer lifestyle. We'll probably average a kilowatt or two consumption, undocking our personal carts from our larger cars to redock into our office cubicles.

Personal experience...

[ohgood]

I previously lived in a small hick town http://www.meridianstar.com/ [meridianstar.com] that had a similar 'elevator garage'. The numbskulls in charge of city spending were sold (or bought) on the idea that three parking garages with elevator only access (for cars) was a way to eliminate parking problems downtown. Now, imagine Aunt Bee with half the soccer team going for pizza. They arrive in their typical deep south suburban, hand the car jockey the keys and walk three blocks for pizza. After filling themselves and sludging three blocks back IN THE RAIN, they find there is a line (queue) of folks waiting on THEIR suburban. Now, the estimated time of top to bottom service (oh hush) of the elevator was 6 minutes, including putting a vehicle on at either end. That means there is at the very least a 6 minute, or 12 minute wait depending on where the elevator is, and your position in line for your car. Oh, and if you forgot something (ever done that) and want to retrieve it before departing the 'garage', you STILL have to wait all that time again. Needless to say the garages were abandoned (paid for mind you) for about 15 years. Someone decided they could be retrofitted (enclosed) to store medical records and now they are gov't white elephants again. Just with the added expense of the retrofit. Note, there is no reference to the old parking garages found in their articles search. Odd, isn't it ?

Re:Cheaper than parking on the street

[Megane]

One thing which could be done to help you would be to mandate that all employers install showers for their workers.

That's unlikely to happen in the US. The reason is because it's a liability because someone might sliiiip and faaaaall. And sue the company into oblivion. I remember when a friend of mine who worked for a big games publisher showed me their new penthouse digs. They had installed showers but were waiting for a proper safety inspection and approval before they could open them.

Re:Cheaper than parking on the street

[jamar0303]

With the new delays and associated mess with air travel, we just need a high-speed West Coast link and a high-speed East-coast link with a cross-country link, so that the backbone is shaped like an H (or like a car's gear shift positions- another link connecting Michigan/Wisconsin/Illinois to Texas) with slower rail connections branching out from there, like Japan does. This will take people cross-country in an equivalent amount of time. Also, this way, existing infrastructure can be used too (connected to the high-speed backbone to service smaller towns and cities).

Re:Cheaper than parking on the street

[metlin]

I would love to live in a city that has decent public transportation so I don't have to own a car. Midwestern cities are usually so spread out, though, that buses are the only reasonable public transportation, and it usually takes a long time to get where you're going.

Tell me about it. I live in downtown Cincinnati, and yet it is almost impossible to be without a car. My girlfriend works just a few miles off (~20) and there are no buses that go there.

Also, public transport does not take you to any of the places that you may need to go to for groceries etc. I imagine that it's much worse in the suburbs. People I know drive ~40 minutes - 2 hours to get to work, and it's just accepted as the way of life.

And do you want to do any kind of activity? Good luck not having a car. Doing just about anything requires a car, and cabs and public transport are simply not as economical.

Re:Hey, garages in your condo is a good idea

[architimmy]

Actually, it's probably a good idea to try and improve building efficiencies as much as possible. Parking on a residential floor is a costly use of square footage. In addition to a large lift you have to provide several hundred square feet for each parking spot. That could easily add up to the same square footage as several units. Which means in financial terms you aren't realizing potential revenue and in terms of efficient use of the building footprint you're not providing the same number of units for people to live in. Considering the costs and potential pollution that goes into constructing a building, not using the footprint efficiently is a decidedly "un-green" thing to do. There's a real reason why urban buildings are very different from suburban ones.

I would imagine that a more likely driving factor in this case was the site's adjacency to the water. I don't work in NYC so I don't know the geotechnical specifics of Manhatten, but if it's silty soil you're going to have a lot of water penetration which means pumps running 24/7 and limitations on how deep you can go. I would imagine the developer simply saw this issue as a justification for doing something as exorbitant and unique as having people park on their floor. More of a marketing gimmick that anything else. A green building has bike storage, public lockers and showers, and is normally situated to make using public transportation easy and practical.