Youcanpark.com targets Cardiff

Youcanpark.com has targeted cardiff as a parking nightmare. With Cardiff becoming more and more popular, and the mass development that is occuring in the area, parking is reaching crisis point. With the ancient city having limited parking, illegal parking is increasing. I was also born in Ponty, near Cardiff, so i really want to offer the city my solution. Anybody with an unused space can list it on www.youcanpark.com and help out whilst earning some money.

New features for Youcanpark.com

The Youcanpark.com team are pleased to announce a great new feature for the site. When advertising their space, owners of the space will now be able to upload pictures of the space. This great idea will enable parkers to not only read about the space, but to see pictures too. Youcanpark.com is the first site to do this. Once again we are leading the online parking market with great ideas to improve the customer experience!!!

Youcanpark.com appears in Venue magazine

Youcanpark.com is featured in this weeks Venue Magazine. The article focusses on the parking nightmare, otherwise known as Bristol. With ideas such as congestion charging, Venue have decided to focus on the solutions available. Youcanpark.com is one of those solutions, so we were more than happy to comment on the problem. To read the article, go to any newsagent and pick one up.

Youcanpark.com gets political backing!

The Directors of Youcanpark.com met with Charlotte Leslie a few days ago to discuss Youcanpark.com. Charlotte, The Conservative candidate for Bristol North, was excited by the concept and has shown her full support.

She said ” This is a really innovative solution to the real problems people face on a day to day basis. Whilst we’ve got to look at getting fewer cars on the roads in the long-term, it’s unfair to penalise everyday car-users in the short-term. If you own a car, you face rising petrol prices, horrendous congestion and at the end of it all, no where to park. It is unfair of policy makers to clamp down on car users if there is no real alternative method of transport.

“This is a great scheme. It will reduce the traffic fumes emitted by cars endlessly growling round looking for spaces, cut down on journey time into work and will turn wasted driveway space into a money-earner for people who live in town. A win-win-win situation. It is also good to see a bright young innovater making ideas a reality. ”

It’s great to see a politician that is both realistic on solutions to our problems, and is in full support of young businessman with ideas. Instead of staying in some office slagging of new businesses, she is out there helping them, and for that we thank her.

On a completely different tangent, Youcanpark.com has made a succesfull launch in Manchester, featuring on BBC Manchester and the Manchester Evening News.

Development of Youcancarshare.com begins!!!

We at Youcanpark.com are pleased to announce the development of our sister site, Youcancarshare.com. The site will allow users to search for people doing similar journeys to their own, and apply to car share wth them. Those interested in car sharing can register themselves, giving details of their journey.

This concept will share the same goal as Youcanpark.com, helping to reduce conjestion and pollution in central area’s.

The site is due for launch at the end of February.

Those interested can leave their email with us by going to www.youcancarshare.com

Parking news: New robotic car park

NEW YORK, USA
Would you trust a robot to park your car?
The question will confront New Yorkers in February as the city’s first robotic parking garage – and America’s first to offer hourly and day-to-day spaces – opens in Chinatown.

The technology has had a good track record outside the United States, but the only other public robotic garage in America has been troublesome, dropping vehicles and trapping cars because of technical glitches.

A construction worker watches as a robotic steel pallet lowers this vehicle into the completely automated parking garage in New York. (Photo: AP)

Nonetheless, the developers of the Chinatown garage, Automotion Parking Systems, the US subsidiary of Germany’s Stolzer Parkhaus, are confident with the technology and are counting on it to squeeze 67 cars in an apartment-building basement that would otherwise fit only 24, accomplished by removing a ramp and manoeuvre space normally required.
Stolzer Parkhaus has built automated garages in several countries overseas and in the United States for residents of a Washington, DC, apartment building.
A humanoid robot valet will not be stepping into cars to drive them.

Rather, the garage itself does the parking. The driver stops the car on a pallet and gets out. The pallet is then lowered into the innards of the garage, and transported to a vacant parking space by a computer-controlled contraption similar to an elevator that also runs sideways.

There is no human supervision, but an attendant will be on hand to accept cash and explain the system to baffled humans.
Parking rates will be competitive – about US$400 (euro310) monthly or US$25 (euro20) per day, according to Ari Milstein, the director of planning for Automotion Parking Systems.
Another company built the only other public robotic garage in the United States, the one with a checkered past.

Built in 2002 across the river in Hoboken, New Jersey, with 314 spaces for monthly rentals only, the garage dropped an unoccupied Cadillac Deville six floors in 2004 and a Jeep four stories the following year. Early last year, a malfunction that went unrepaired for 26 hours trapped cars inside.

This summer, the city of Hoboken tried to wrest control of the garage from its builder, Robotic Parking Systems Inc of Clearwater, Florida, and an ensuing court battle shut it down for two weeks, trapping some cars inside. The garage is closed until Thursday as the city replaces the controlling software, city spokesman Bill Campbell said.

Dennis Clarke, the chief operating officer at Robotic Parking, acknowledged the operational problems, but said the garage has operated with “99.99 per cent efficiency”. He called the 26-hour outage a freak incident, where two redundant sensors failed at the same time and a maintenance crew failed to follow company policy in not repairing them right away.

The company’s current generation of garages is much improved, Clarke added.

“Software-wise, machinery-wise, everything that has ever given us a problem has been designed out of the system,” Clarke said.
Automotion’s Milstein said that in the 11 years Stolzer Parkhaus has built robotic garages, only one car has been damaged, in an incident involving a half-set parking brake. Even that loophole has now been eliminated with the addition of an additional sensor, he said.

“It is a complete virtual impossibility that damage can occur,” he said.
If the garage lives up to that claim, it would certainly be a safety record unheard of for traditional garages, where not only cars but people get hurt and even killed. Even the Hoboken garage may not look like a disaster by comparison, though it is rare for a conventional garage not to give your car back.

The two loading bays in the Chinatown garage are outfitted with laser and radar sensors that sense if the car fits on the pallet and look for movement to determine whether the driver and passenger have left the car. When the car is properly parked on the pallet, the driver is told to exit the car and leave the bay, and a door closes behind him or her before the pallet descends into the garage.

When the driver comes back for the car, the underground system goes into motion to retrieve it. Because it parks cars two deep in some slots, it sometimes needs to shuffle cars around to retrieve others. The software figures all that out.
An underground turntable turns the car around before it is lifted to the surface, ensuring that it is returned facing out into the driveway, eliminating any need to back out of the garage.
Clarke at Robotic Parking Systems said demand for robotic parking is booming in the country after long lagging behind other developed countries.

The company just finished shipping a 900-car garage to Dubai and signed a deal for a 1,200-car garage for the United Arab Emirates. It is also working on several US projects, including one 229-car garage at the Hollywood Grande resort in Florida.
“Demand is such that they’re really stacking up on us,” Clarke said. “What seems to have happened is that the developers have been wanting this for a long time, but the architects have been lagging behind. Architects use the same plans over and over, particularly when it comes to parking in a garage.”

Youcanpark.com goes multi national!

Youcanpark.com has taken ownership of its third office, located in Dubai. The office will be responsible for the day to day running of the site, including email send outs and sorting of spaces. The decision was taken to open the third office when email numbers were increasing rapidly. Within a week of opening nearly 500 emails were recieved! The new staff are a welcome edition to the Youcanpark.com team, and it is hoped that they will settle in quickly.

Youcanpark.com sponsor’s Bath FM

Youcanpark.com is pleased to announce it is sponsoring Bath FM’s competition to win a parking space!!! The competition will be on Knocka’s big breakfast show. It starts on Monday 5th Jan and runs for 30 days. So check it out! Listen on 107.9 fm and win that space!!!

We also thought it would be good for everyone to see the owner of the site, Tom Page. So please check out the picture!!!