Tour the Garage of the Future

I've always felt a warm regard for the Parisian thug in the 1981 policier Diva (NOT pictured left - that image is from Seinfeld). In the course of an overly long stake-out in a French parking garage, the fiend in the dark, wrap-around glasses deadpans menacingly to his companion: "Je deteste parking." Moi aussi. But I could probably learn to live more happily with parking garages in Philadelphia if they were smaller, less obtrusive and consumed less downtown real estate.

Short of everyone becoming a bicycle commuter, the best hope for cramming more cars in less Center City space is robotic parking, a relatively new technology that is gaining acceptance. Parkway Corp. will install a cutting edge, underground robotic system in 1706 Rittenhouse if that project ever gets anywhere. And of course, we've been hearing for eight years how Wayne Spilove is going to build a 12-story, above-ground automated parking garage at 16th and Sansom Street. His dream garage is still a scruffy asphalt parking lot. In the meantime, you can see what the hype is all about by taking a video tour of a new automated garage in New York here, courtesy of the BBC. If all the cars in Philadelphia were so cute and small, we wouldn't need to devote so much space to parking.