Public parking garage
A multi-storey car park (also called a parking garage, parking structure, parking ramp, parkade, parking building, parking deck or indoor parking) is a building designed for car parking and where there are a number of floors or levels on which parking takes place. It is essentially an indoor, stacked parking lot. Parking structures may be heated if they are enclosed.
Design of parking structures can add considerable cost for planning new developments, and can be mandated by cities or states in new building parking requirements. Some cities such as London have abolished previously enacted minimum parking requirements.
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 and hour.
The earliest known multi-storey car park 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 multi-tiered parking garage.
The movement of vehicles between floors can be affected by:
Where the car park is built on sloping land, it may be split-level or have sloped parking.
Many car parks are independent buildings dedicated exclusively to that use. The design loads for car parks are often less than the office building they serve (50 psf versus 80 psf), leading to long floor spans of 55–60 feet that permit cars to park in rows without supporting columns in between. The most common structural systems in the United States for these structures are either prestressed concrete double-tee floor systems or post-tensioned cast-in-place concrete floor systems.
In recent times, car parks built to serve residential and some business properties have been built as part of a larger building, often underground as part of the basement, such as at the Atlantic Station redevelopment in Atlanta. This saves land for other uses (as opposed to a parking lot), is cheaper and more practical in most cases than a separate structure, and is hidden from view. It protects customers and their cars from weather such as rain, snow, or hot summer sunshine that raises a vehicle's interior temperature to extremely high levels. Underground parking of only two levels was considered an innovative concept in 1964, when developer Louis Lesser developed a two-level underground parking structure under six 10-storey high-rise residential halls at California State University, Los Angeles, which lacked space for horizontal expansion in the 176-acre (0.71 km2) university. The simple two-level parking structure was considered unusual enough in 1964 that a separate newspaper section entitled "Parking Underground" described the garage as an innovative "concept" and as "subterranean spaces". In Toronto, a 2,400 space parking lot below Nathan Phillips Square is one of the world's largest.
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