A Ferris Wheel for Cars and Trucks

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By Benjamin Preston

Vertical parking devices, like the steel stacking shelves that hold several cars, are common around the city, but a new vertical parking system that can turn two street-level parking spaces into a dozen has come to Brooklyn.

Three 43-foot-tall steel structures from Parkmatic, a company based in New York, were recently installed in a parking lot on the corner of Tillary and Gold Streets. The system tries to simplify vertical parking by stacking cars on an automated Ferris wheel of sorts and has increased the capacity of the Brooklyn lot almost 30 percent.

The difference between Parkmatic's carousel and standard space-maximizing devices is that it doesn't require moving vehicles out of the way to get to other cars. In a typical two-, three- or four-high stacker, the bottom vehicles must be moved out of the way so the top shelves can be lowered to the ground.

A keypad at the front of each carousel allows lot attendants to select the vehicle they want. An electric motor hums quietly as a double roller chain and steel links bring hinged trays down and then back up, as on a Ferris wheel. In about two minutes, which depends on the number of cars the carousel is set up to hold, the top car can be brought to street level. The machine moves clockwise and counterclockwise, and a computer chooses the quickest direction for the vehicle that has been selected.

The parking lot is not far from the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges and is at the center of a rapidly changing area. A few months ago, the 43-foot-tall steel structures would have stood out among the low buildings that lined the block. But high-rise buildings are going up many places in high-traffic Downtown Brooklyn, so they seem to fit in now.

"We have quite a few developers who are interested in this because of land value," Max Wassef, principal owner of Parkmatic, said. "In conventional garages, the overall development cost of each space is $25,000 to $30,000. This lowers the cost to about $16,000 per space."

Parking carousels are nothing new. Mr. Wassef says they were developed in the 1920s. According to the Parkmatic website, a handful were installed in Chicago and New York.

"Back then, we never really had a need with so much land, so it never took off," he said.

But the idea found a home in Asia and Europe. Mr. Wassef says there are 700 Parkmatic carousel systems worldwide, and the Brooklyn system is the company's first in the United States.

Michael Zacharias, who owns the lot on Tillary Street, said he had been trying to find a better way to use the space for about a decade. When he found out about the parking carousel, he visited its factory in Korea to see the system for himself.

He said it took about eight months to complete the city's regulatory process for the carousels, mostly because there was a four-level height restriction in the area. So he can now park 138 cars in his lot, 30 more than before, but if he could fill the lot with carousels and get the zoning approval, that would increase to 648.

Mr. Wassef said the carousels could be set up to accommodate seven to 12 vehicles and be ordered with enough space for all but the largest sport utility vehicles, like Hummers and Chevrolet Suburbans. The carousels are also assembled to meet local seismic and wind resistance standards, and they have safety beams that stop the mechanism if someone or something gets in the way.

Mr. Zacharias said now that the regulatory ice had been broken, he planned to install carousels at other lots he owned around the city.

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