| Parking spaces generally have about 2.5ft of extra space for door opening. Airports often a bit more due to people carrying bags. It's also the fact that a Smart car takes up the same space in a parking garage as an original Hummer. I've been in a Costco parking lot where someone in a Mini has parked over the line into the opposing space (overlapping on the front not the sides). I drive an F150 so I pulled tight on him and bumped him and the parking gear rolled me an inch away. I didn't grab much (I think it was pop, water and hotdogs/burgers for a party) and got out while he was still loading his car. I dropped my tailgate and started throwing the cases in (and pushing against the tailgate) so that my truck rocked and hit his car. The guy said "Hey buddy, you're hitting my car." I walk around, look at the fronts of the vehicle, take a picture with my phone (my trucks a company vehicle so we get targeted by all sorts of morons who think we punctured their tire) and I said "I don't know, it looks like you hit me. I'm well within my space." The TL;DR: to that was "People are idiots who can't park small cars in big spaces" so I'm quite confident parking efficiency can be increased dramatically by decreasing wasted parking space. You can also presumably halve the amount of driving lanes required. If only 3 robots serve the entire complex there should be enough routes to never run into them having to travel the same lane at once. That alone could likely increase efficiency dramatically; if a lane is wide enough to drive in, it's wide enough to park a car in, and by a guesstimate with no room between vehicles you could likely pack 3 vehicles wide in the width of 2 driving lanes. You also mention packing the cars in. If the software has access to boarding times, and return times then they could presumably pack vehicles in 5 deep or more. You could have a parking space 10 vehicles deep, if you've got lane access on either side you put the cars in ordered by arrival time. Row 1 gets in at 3pm, row 2 gets in at 3:30pm, etc. and you just unload from the opposing side. If you made an entire parking lot structure accessible this way, you could presumably increase parking efficiency well beyond a 50% increase with the reduction of all driving lanes. |