Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 90.djvu/402

A Model Six Hundred-Car Garage

An automobile can get into or out
of it in from ten to fifteen seconds

Each car has its own stall in the form of an island platform which guides it into or out of the aisle. This eliminates crowding and exasperating delays

IN the giant garage shown on these two pages, the exasperating delays often encountered in getting cars into or out of the aisle are eliminated, because the garage has no elevators and the cars are automatically spaced on the floors in such a manner that there is sufficient room for each one to run out into the aisle without disturbing the cars next to it.

Inclined concrete ramps take the place of elevators, each ramp being twenty feet wide. They are arranged so that one line of cars goes up while another line is coming down. There is a concrete curb in the center of each ramp, to restrict the lines of cars to separate paths, so as to prevent collisions between cars passing in opposite directions. Besides being a great convenience to the individual automobile owner, these two-way ramps will effect a saving of approximately $18,250 in annual overhead expense for the garage-owner. The ramps from floor to floor of the four-story structure take up the same amount of room as elevators, but the cost of building them is the only expense connected with them. It costs nothing to operate them when once built. The designer of the garage, H. B. Mulliken, of New York city, has calculated that the cost of each trip of an elevator is ten cents and that the average daily number of cars going up and down in the six hundred-car structure would be two hundred and fifty, making five hundred trips in all.

The delays incident to backing a car into its stall between two other cars whose positions are only approximated by white-wash lines on the floor or numbers on the walls, have been eliminated by the use of island location platforms much the same

With a capacity for six hundred cars the new

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