How to find parking spaces in cities.

Fifty rubles per hour—this is the fee for parking within the Boulevard Ring that the capital’s authorities are planning to introduce starting next year. The coordinator of the Blue Buckets society, Pyotr Shkumatov, recently called this amount “exorbitant.” But while the capital’s car enthusiasts are so inclined, the commercial effectiveness of parking lots can be forgotten and investors will only build them under pressure. Meanwhile, the situation is crisis. There are more than 4 million cars in Moscow and only 1.6 million parking spaces. Often, equipping a parking space is simply a matter of applying neat markings on those areas inside yards where residents have previously parked their cars. Over the past year, only 73,000 new spaces were created in capital multi-level parking lots (including those located in shopping centers) (and in just one year, 600,000 spaces were equipped). The situation is worst in the city center. If in each of the “non-central” administrative districts of Moscow there are 20–30 “People’s Garage” parking lots, then in the Central Administrative District there are only six of them. This is understandable: with such dense buildings it is much more difficult to find a free site. There is not enough space under bridges and overpasses for everyone; building underground parking lots is very expensive. However, many megacities have already faced this problem and learned to solve it. Here are some examples.

On the water

Gothenburg, Sweden

A group of businessmen from New York approached the authorities with the idea of mooring heavy-duty ships on the embankment and turning them into giant parking lots back in 1988. However, one of the first floating parking lots appeared in 1991 in Gothenburg, the second largest city in Sweden. Architects from the Abako bureau decorated the structure, which consists of an old barge built in the 1970s in Korea and a concrete frame built over it, with distinctive metal wings. Thanks to its heaviness and the system of attachment to the pier, the barge “quenches” the waves of the Geta-Elv River on which it stands, and is capable of receiving 400 cars at the same time.

There are floating parking lots in the Netherlands, Denmark, and Greece. They have many advantages. Most cities were built near water, so finding a few places on the embankments near the city center to moor a ship is not too difficult. If the traffic situation changes, the parking barge can be easily moved to another location. Maybe it's the climate? The average annual temperature in Gothenburg is 7 degrees, and in Moscow - 5.8. In addition, ice on the Moscow River does not interfere with landing stages for restaurants and hotels.

Last year, Moscow authorities announced a competition (115 million rubles from the budget) for the construction of a floating parking lot near Vorobyovy Gory, but the competition was soon cancelled. Officials decided that it was ineffective to build such a facility using budget funds and were looking for private investors.

Above the ground

Chicago, USA, Wolfsburg, Germany

photo by Fotobank/Getty Images

In the mid-1960s in Chicago, on a small (only about 1.5 hectares) site on the site of an old railway siding, construction began on an unusual pair of skyscrapers - the 64-story Marina City complex. Unusual, because the first 19 floors of the skyscrapers are occupied by a parking lot for 1,800 cars. This is approximately the height of the demolished Intourist Hotel on Tverskaya Street in Moscow. Try to imagine Intourist, filled to the brim not with tourists, but with cars.

You need to enter the 19th floor in a spiral; there is no lifting mechanism. “The first car reached the 19th floor without incident,” the Chicago Daily Tribune wrote on February 11, 1964, “although the incline is somewhat steep on the first four floors.” Today, leaving a car there for two hours costs $23. Designed in the 1960s to bring people from the suburbs back to the city center, the corncob-shaped towers remain popular today.

The German Volkswagen also decided to use height to save space. On the site of two high-rise cement storage silos near the Wolfsburg plant, the company built two 20-story, 48-meter-high glass towers that could accommodate 800 cars. Cars coming off the assembly line are automatically delivered here, and the buyer can view them from a glass elevator.

In the theatre

Detroit, USA

This, of course, is not an example to follow, but a story about how you can use a parking lot to save a historical building that has lost its original meaning. The luxurious Michigan Theater building was built on the site of Henry Ford's garage, where he made his first car, in 1926. An auditorium with 4,000 seats, a luxuriously decorated hall - all this made the theater owner boast: this is not a theater for Detroit, this is a theater for the whole world.

In the 1960s, the Michigan Theater, like many others, was closed due to unprofitability. They wanted to demolish it, but engineers found a use for the spacious building with open spaces. After carrying out reconstruction, they vacated the first three levels of the theater and organized a parking lot there for 160 spaces. And now, under the vaults of the theater, which have preserved their original appearance, live the natives of Detroit - cars.

It can be difficult to use historical buildings for parking due to the small spacing of load-bearing columns. However, there is an exception - industrial buildings, where the column spacing is wider. As the city expands, former factory buildings end up in the center or close to it. In Europe and especially in the UK, projects for the redevelopment of factories while preserving the historical appearance of industrial buildings are being actively discussed. Popular ideas are to open a public area, a playground for children and a parking lot on the site of the factory.

Getting out of the dead end