Big Apple-style parking in Boulder? Ask the robot

BOULDER — Business people who land an office in downtown Boulder’s high-profile Pearl West development will pay about $200 a month to store the Benz or Tesla in a super-secure, $1.2 million robotic parking garage.

According to the developers of the project, the garage is the first of its kind in Colorado, joining similar garages in New York, Los Angeles, Miami and soon Dubai.

Pearl West is the redeveloped site that housed the Daily Camera newspaper at 11th and Pearl streets. It will consist of retail shops, restaurants – including one on the rooftop – and office space in addition to underground parking, both automated and conventional, when it opens in 2016.

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The project is expected to help ease the downtown parking shortage, with the public having access to an additional 209 spaces in addition to the private, automated facility.

New Jersey-based Park Plus Inc., has developed software for a wireless automated traffic-management system that uses markers, vision systems and lasers to guide battery-powered pallets that transport cars to their designated parking spaces.

Drivers will pull into a loading bay, get out of their car, punch buttons on a kiosk panel and leave the rest to the robots.

Click here to see the robotic parking garage in action.

The pre-programmed system knows in which space a car belongs, will take it there, and then retrieve it for the owner when requested via the kiosk. The system will scan the vehicle and can detect people or dogs, and won’t park the car with them inside. But if you leave your gym bag in the back seat, you’ll have to ask the system to retrieve your car to get it out.

Ryan Astrup, director of Park Plus, said it takes about 90 seconds for the system to load a car and have it ready to head to its space.

The spaces will be rented on a monthly basis to people who work at businesses in the building. Randy Nichols, a part-owner in the project and president of Nichols Partnership Inc., the developer, said a space in the automated garage will go for $200 or more per month. Similar automated parking structures in midtown Manhattan, London and Tokyo all command up to $500 a month, according to Gizmag Emerging Technology magazine.

The Pearl West system will provide 61 spaces in a 14,567-square-foot area 14 feet below ground. In a conventional garage, the same space could accommodate about 40 spaces. Astrup said that’s because of the elimination of ramps and additional drive-aisles. “Cars can be stored very close together,” he said. “No doors need to be opened.”

There also will be a conventional three-level, 209-space underground parking garage for tenants and the general public. The city of Boulder charges a quarterly fee of $285, or $95 per month, for a space in any of its five downtown parking garages. However, there are 1,598 people on a wait list to secure a space on the quarterly system, a city spokesman said.

The city does not require a minimum number of spaces, but the developers felt there was a need to provide some. “People in Class A offices will expect parking,” Nichols said.

The automated system at Pearl West will have two loading bays, each equipped with a removable pallet that is transported by one of three automated guided vehicles, or AGVs. The AGVs can rotate 360 degrees.

The battery-powered AGV slides under the pallet holding a car, lifts the pallet slightly and travels a preprogrammed route to the assigned parking space. When not in use, the AGVs return to a docking/charging bay.

“This technology is very similar to warehouse storage systems that have been around since the 1950s,” said Andreas Wastel, vice president for engineering at Park Plus. “But we have advanced the technology, and just in the last few years we have begun to apply it to the parking industry. The principles are the same. The software is just more sophisticated.”

Park Plus has developed and installed smaller garages in Manhattan, completed a 410-space automated garage in Maryland and is working on a 1,200-space project in Dubai. Its main competition in the United States is Boomerang Systems Inc., also based in New Jersey, which has an engineering campus in Logan, Utah. More than a dozen companies worldwide manufacture automated parking systems, which first hit the scene in 2000.

Astrup said the cost per space for a system the size of Pearl West’s is about $20,000. That’s a total of $1.2 million, not including the construction of the floors, walls and ceiling of the garage.

But there are savings in building and maintaining the garage, Astrup said. “Because the cars aren’t running, and the AGVs are run on batteries, it doesn’t require as elaborate ventilation system, and not as much lighting or heating during the winter,” he said. “It also adds value from a safety standpoint. People aren’t able to access the garage past the kiosk.”

Doug Storum can be reached at 303-630-1959, 970-416-7369 or dstorum@bizwestmedia.com.