Robotic Garages Might Solve Beijing's Parking Problem

Beijing is now seeing the development of robotic garages, in a bid to address the problem of where drivers can park the nearly 5 million cars in this city.

As our Wang Jing reports, the addition of these new, high-tech parking garages comes amid the recent increase in parking fees here in Beijing.

This is one of the growing number of robotic garages in downtown Beijing.

With a few clicks on a monitor, drivers can stand by and let the machines park or retrieve their cars automatically.

Mr. Xu is among the first users of this new robotic parking garage, recently installed in an office building in the high-density Central Business District in downtown Beijing.

"The system is automatic and very convenient. It's quite easy. You just have to follow the instructions."

While there are some 5-million vehicles registered in the capital, there are only an estimated 1.3-million parking spots.

But the lack of legal parking spots doesn't seem to be deterring people in the capital from driving.

Instead, many drivers will simply find parking space where they please, including sidewalks and designated traffic lanes, creating even more traffic chaos on the already slow-moving Beijing streets.

To try to get past this problem, the municipal government here in Beijing has announced 56-new measures to try to ease the traffic snarls in the city, which includes the promotion of these new robotic garages in the downtown core.

Already popular in Europe and Japan, robotic garages now are gaining popularity in Beijing because of their convenience and efficient use of space.

Wang Guohua, who supplies the robotic garage technology, says a robotic garage 500 square meters in size can hold 162 vehicles, 4-times as many vehicles that a normal garage could hold.

"Such garages are mostly suitable for big cities like Beijing where land is expensive and traffic is intense."

While the market is wide open for the introduction of robotic garages here in Beijing, with only about 2 to 3 percent of the parking garages in the capital equipped with the technology, not everyone is jumping on board.

Many parking garage owners are holding back, said to be concerned about the high costs.

A robotic mechanism for a garage that can hold 50 vehicles comes with a price-tag of about 5-million yuan.

Investors too are said to be a bit wary of putting money into the systems, given that a return on investment isn't guaranteed.

As such, a number of experts are now suggesting government investment is needed.

While robotic garages are a relatively new phenomenon here in Beijing, they are a mainstay in other large cities.

Some 70-percent of the parking garages in Tokyo now have the robotic parking devices installed in them.

For CRI, I'm Wang Jing.