By: A. Shankar, Head–Strategic Consulting (Chennai|Coimbatore|Colombo), JLL India
Track2Realty: India, the second most populated country in the world houses more than 40 million vehicles and is the only country which saw a growing car sales even during the recession and recorded the highest sales volume during 2009 and 2010.
Since it has a strong domestic market, the growth is expected to be sustainable and increase over the next few years since India’s car per capita ratio is currently among the lowest in the world’s top 10 auto markets.
However infrastructure available for the vehicles like roads parking spaces have been a challenge in most the Indian cities.
Indian cities face severe problem of congestion due to runway growth of personalized vehicles. The traffic management in the many cities is marked by introduction of a series of one-way traffic system.
The one-way traffic system has, however, implications on pedestrian safety and fuel consumption. One-way traffic is generally desirable when there are complementary roads and the additional traveling distance is not more than 300m as per IRC. Hence whenever such systems are introduced, the interests of public transport modes and pedestrians are duly addressed.
Demand for parking in the CBD areas of Indian cities is twice the supply. Acute shortage of parking supply is witnessed in commercial areas and indiscriminate parking impedes free flow of traffic and cause accidents.
Automatic multi-storey car parks provide lower building cost per parking slot, as they typically require less building volume and less ground area than a conventional facility with the same capacity.
However, the cost of the mechanical equipment within the building that is needed to transport cars internally needs to be added to the lower building cost to determine the total costs. Other costs are usually lower too, for example there is no need for an energy intensive ventilating system, since cars are not driven inside and human cashiers or security personnel may not be needed.
Automated car parks rely on similar technology that is used for mechanical handling and document retrieval. The driver leaves the car in an entrance module. It is then transported to a parking slot by a robot trolley. For the driver, the process of parking is reduced to leaving the car inside an entrance module.
