Stacked parking rises in downtown San Jose garage

Imagine a machine automatically retrieving your car from a parking garage. Just insert your key in the control panel and enter a pin number. Within minutes, your car is lowered from an upper deck and shifted to the correct slot. The garage door opens and voila, your car is at your disposal, unscratched and dent-free.

That's the idea behind the new automated parking system that is part of the One East Julian condominium development in downtown San Jose.

As developers build more residential units in downtown San Jose and the price of land soars, space-efficient garages are an obvious solution to parking problems. Builders say the stacking parking system – which is designed to fit cars, smaller trucks and SUVs – is cheaper to build and can accommodate more cars than usual.

"The automobile and the need to provide for it has shaped much of the development in this area," said Harry Mavrogenes, director of the San Jose Redevelopment Agency, which previously owned the One East Julian site, formerly a surface parking lot.

"More and more, we’re going to see unique solutions as space gets tighter."

While San Jose city planners were originally skeptical about the machine-operated garage, the builder and architect at One East Julian assured them it was safe and that the two-tiered parking lift could withstand an earthquake. In the event of a power outage, a battery backup system kicks in. However, car access may be limited in some older stacked parking systems, according to one developer who has installed the systems in his buildings.

At the One East Julian garage, about half of the 64-space garage is part of the stacking system. By saving space on parking, builder Regis Homes was able to expand the number of residences at the condo site from 37 to 43. The city requires at least 1.5 parking spaces for every one-bedroom unit.

The idea seems to be catching on. The developer of Vendome Place, a high-rise apartment building at First and Taylor streets, has planned a 500-car parking garage to accommodate future phases of the development. Half of the parking spaces could be mechanized in a lift parking system.

"We are comparing the cost of an actual lift unit vs. the cost of a second floor," developer Jessie Thielen said. An automated parking system would result in a significant savings, she said.

The $485,000 parking system that Regis Homes chose, made by the German company Wöhr, fits one car per 200 square feet, about 100 square feet less than a traditional parking space. The builder is still ironing out the kinks in the parking system. This week, for example, the car lift system stopped working for a few days because of an operational error, and the carbon monoxide alarm went off inside the garage when a car engine was left running.

The parking systems aren't new. They’ve been popular in Germany and Japan for years, and have already made waves in Berkeley, Oakland, Emeryville, and San Francisco, which even changed its planning code to allow for stacked parking.

Berkeley developer Patrick Kennedy said he saw value in the parking lifts more than 10 years ago, when he began installing the German-manufactured Klaus parking system in apartment garages. He started small, with a 12-car parking system in 1995, and installed a 66-car system in another building four years ago.

"It was a purely economic decision," Kennedy said. "You can triple or quadruple the cars you can fit in the space."

Genevieve Gould, a 20-year-old University of California-Berkeley student, uses the lift system at her downtown Berkeley apartment building. Wednesday night, she pulled her car into the garage, where she first unloaded her groceries and then parked in her assigned space. She got out of the car, then pushed a button that raised her car to the second level, leaving a slot open for a vehicle underneath.

"When I first took a tour of the building, the garage was kind of intimidating because of all the machinery," Gould said. "But now I’m used to it."

The system can be inconvenient for drivers used to instant access to their cars. It takes about two to three minutes for the car to be lifted up, and a minute to two for the car to be lowered.

Dyor Chen, who just moved in to an Oakland apartment complex with the stacking parking system, is just getting the hang of it. He said his parking space for his four-door sedan is very small. And since he's recovering from knee surgery and uses crutches, it's difficult for him to get in and out of the cage-like space.

While the system works fine for a residential or office complex, San Jose development chief Mavrogenes doesn't think the stacked parking system would be realistic for city-owned public garages, where people are looking for convenience.

"In some cities where space is tight and there's an extremely high value of land, you need to have these systems," Mavrogenes said. "I don't see this happening in San Jose."

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