Audio By Carbonatix
Three tourists step out of the bright light, their pupils dilating in the newfound shade. They glance, bug-eyed, at their green plastic poker chip, then at Tom Vogel Jr. It’s a beseeching gaze, but Vogel, laid-back in sneakers, khaki shorts, and fish-print shirt, only smiles, points to a sign on the wall of the parking garage, and turns away. They don’t call it self-park for nothing.”You have to go to the mindset of, “It’s only going to be this way,'” he shrugs.
Vogel’s tough love is prescient. One day soon parking is only going to be this way — high-speed and fully automated; impersonal, perhaps, but efficient. This is progress, approaching with the relentless momentum of a U-Bahn train. In the future, at garages and lots all over South Florida, green chips will be inserted into yellow machines, read, computed, and spit back out again.
Now if only the confused tourists would slip their chip into the pay machines, they too could release the exit gate at One River Plaza and be free. If only…
“The chip is the key,” Vogel says, then repeats it like a mantra.
To Jason Howe, general manager of the Las Olas Riverfront development, it’s an oracle. “The chip,” he says without a trace of irony, “is the future of parking in Fort Lauderdale.”
Vogel holds the future, a half-dollar size parking token, up to the light, revealing the square silhouette of a computer microchip inside. He examines it intently: “The chip is so interesting.”
In theory, at least, it’s also simple. Customers enter, take a chip at the gate, and park. When they return they drop the chip in a machine, which calculates the fee based on elapsed time. (Prepaid Parkchips can also be printed with company logos and given away in promotions.) After customers insert cash or a credit card to pay, the chip is returned to them to be used to open the exit gate.
In practice, however, the Parkchip plays like an experiment in human behavior or perhaps a test of memory. On one recent weekday, several frustrated customers doubled back for their chips, despite signs posted around the lot reminding them not to leave it in the car. (Since customers pay upon return to the garage, not at the exit gate, failing to carry the chip means an extra trip to retrieve it.) Others emerged from the lot with a chip in the hand — and one on the shoulder.
“I don’t like it,” said Fort Lauderdale resident Carla Blair, grimacing. “I prefer the traditional system where you pay as you leave. I don’t like the whole Parkchip system.”
Her friend, Joanne Braathen, agrees: “It gets rid of jobs,” she says. “And besides, who watches your car when you leave?”
Another woman apparently missed the instruction signs entirely, took her chip to the exit without paying, and forced a line of cars behind her to back up so she could turn around, park again, and pay.
Parking wasn’t always this “interesting.” Its currency was once — in some cases, still is — rectangular cards dyed drab industrial shades and marked with an inky-black stripe that happens to be magnetic.
And therein lies the problem. Stricter environmental regulations have made magnetic materials increasingly difficult to dispose of and thus more costly. In response designers in Germany have created an alternative: vacuum-sealing a microchip into nontoxic, reusable plastic. Each chip costs about $6 to make, and unlike the old magnetic model, tokens of the modern Parkplatz don’t simply read information, they can also be erased and rewritten, like a chalkboard.
About 2000 such chips course through the networked system at One River Plaza. Stacked on a desk, they make the glassed-in garage office look like the counting room at Harrah’s. It’s no coincidence — the Parkchip machines, which are able to count and return the chips, borrow from technology used by the gaming industry, says Bill Reis, general manager of Cleveland-based Intellichip Technologies. Founded by German entrepreneur Johann Farmont three years ago, Intellichip has since outfitted eight U.S. parking lots, with three more being installed. Vogel discovered the company while researching self-park systems for the new 400-space garage next to his 20-year-old building on Las Olas. He paid $180,000 for the equipment, then hired a management company to maintain it.
One River Plaza’s garage is the first and only one of its kind in Florida, but soon, Reis says, there’ll likely be many more. USA Parking, the company that manages the garage and dominates the local parking business, is considering Intellichip for at least one other facility. Owner Bill Bodenhamer, Broward’s politically connected parking king, beat out two national parking companies for the contract to manage the county’s garage on SE Second Street. Formerly free to the public, the garage was returned to the county in an agreement reached with the developer and may soon use the Parkchip system.
Likewise the Riverfront Hotel is also considering Intellichip for a planned new garage. Another hotel currently being built in Fort Lauderdale may follow suit.
Vogel’s not surprised. He’s high on the Parkchip, in large part because it solves management’s perennial problem — workers. Gone is the uniformed attendant once trapped in a Plexiglas cocoon. With fewer employees parking lot owners don’t have to worry about workers “stealing from either you or your customer, or they artificially inflate prices or whatever.”
In fact Vogel has only reduced his staff by one or two. Still, he’s anticipated the backlash: “People always say, “You’re eliminating jobs.’ Well, we’re not. We’re creating a better-paying, more valuable job.”
Gabby, a white-uniformed employee who monitors parking at One River Plaza, says the automated system is a plus for workers because it’s easier to handle customers’ complaints. “If somebody has a problem, I don’t deal with it. I mean, it’s a computer. I tell them to talk to the person who designed the system.”
Back at the entrance, Vogel smiles as a line of first-timers approaches the machines. Instructions, broadcast Big Brotherstyle, echo throughout the concrete cavern.
“Nobody reads signs,” he says, shaking his head, “you gotta hit ’em with everything.”
The soundtrack is a lot like the monotonous drone of an airport recording, but Vogel has plans for that, too: “There’ll probably be some music in there, too,” he says. “Maybe some Jimmy Buffett songs.”
To Vogel, at least, Intellichip is inevitable. “This will make the parking booth obsolete,” he says with certainty. First, though, he has to stop “enabling” customers — he has to break them of their attendant codependence.
A line forms in front of the machines. A little girl marvels at the green chip, as if it were a toy just pulled from a Happy Meal. Tourists, Vogel notes with a hint of pride, often want to take them home. But in this case the girl’s parents just pause, look troubled, then smooth their bills to pay.
Meanwhile, Vogel saunters back to the elevator, mashes the “up” button and turns to flash a knowing grin.
“If you help them,” he warns, “they’re just going to sit there and wait for it.”
