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"  When you pull into one of the 12 brightly lit underground entry-and-exit rooms in the 697-car parking garage just beginning construction beneath Brooklyn&amp;#039;s forthcoming Willoughby Square, you will not be greeted by a valet harboring Mario Andretti fantasies. And you won&amp;#039;t have to navigate a labyrinthian maze of concrete. Instead, you&amp;#039;ll confront nothing but a bumper-level fish-eye mirror and a large flat-screen TV.  Connected to a quartet of laser guidance sensors, the monitor will help you position your vehicle on a pallet in the floor with tire-width ruts: MOVE TO THE LEFT, INCH FORWARD. (The mirror provides a visual assist.) After you set the parking brake and turn off and exit the vehicle, the screen will then walk you through a series of safety questions to ensure that you&amp;#039;ve closed your doors, removed your valuables, and verified the departure of all occupants (motion detectors confirm this last bit). As you exit the room to collect your retrieval receipt, a metal gate will roll down behind you, and your vehicle will, without a solitary human interaction, vanish into subterranean mystery.  Conventional parking garages are inefficient. They require ramps, driving lanes, room for doors to open and close, and significant chunks of concrete and metal between each level. AutoMotion Parking Systems, a builder of automated garages and the company behind the Brooklyn project, will do away with all of this, replacing those bulky and disorienting double helices with a half-dozen 200-foot-long bays, each lined on both sides with car-size cubbies stacked three to five high. Via five automated hoists, vehicles will be whisked on metal pallets from the entry rooms to their temporary homes and back again. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s like a vending machine for cars,&amp;quot; Ari Milstein, executive director of AutoMotion, says.  Upon completion in 2016, this vehicular Funyuns dispenser will be the biggest automated garage in the country. And by condensing the space required for parking cars by half, the Willoughby garage will yield major savings in the materials and costs of excavation and construction. In a city like New York, where space means serious money, the ability to park 700 cars in an area ordinarily occupied by 350 is a boon for developers.  The benefits of automated garages are not reserved just for big cities, either. Robotic lots are also starting to find support on suburban planning boards, where they&amp;#039;re seen as a means of fostering Main Street retail density and combating the draining sprawl of big-box stores. In addition to space and materials savings, there are other advantages to automated garages. Removing the driving from parking yields environmental benefits through the elimination of engine idling and emissions. Automated garages also eliminate the need for ventilation systems, a fact that&amp;#039;s particularly salient in the Brooklyn project. &amp;quot;In a regular garage, with cars driving underground, you have to create huge systems of mechanical ventilation to suck up the pollution and blow it somewhere else.&amp;quot; Milstein says. &amp;quot;The somewhere else in this case would have been a park with kids in it.&amp;quot; By eliminating the possibility of human error from the system, there&amp;#039;s also a reduction in collateral damage. The garage industry averages about one insurable incident for every hundred cars. Yet in parking more than 300,000 cars since 2007, AutoMotion maintains that it&amp;#039;s had zero claims. Milstein adds that every car in his underground lots remained undamaged in the high-water inundation of Hurricane Sandy, though after the city&amp;#039;s power failure, the vehicles were immobilized below street level.  Notwithstanding concerns about your car getting stuck underground, the automated garage is likely to become more common for its sheer sensibleness and eco-friendliness. As for those drivers who might worry about finding themselves being shuffled about in the mechanical belly of a robot garage, Milstein insists that AutoMotion&amp;#039;s record is unimpeachable. &amp;quot;No one has gotten swallowed yet,&amp;quot; he says. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/a9526/sorry-valets-the-automated-parking-garage-is-coming-15964165/>