A man parked in the eight-level car park at the new Dundrum shopping centre, left his ticket in the car, forgot where he parked and couldn't remember his registration number. He was sorted in less than a minute. Patrick Logue reports on what may be the most advanced car park in the world
Nine months might sound like a lot of time to dig a hole, but the hole needed to house the car park at the Dundrum shopping centre was no ordinary one. Indeed the car park is no ordinary car park.
Car park anoracks, of course, or those with a penchant for excessive counting and measuring will already know that Dundrum boasts 3,400 parking spaces over 1 million square feet, spanning eight levels, seven of which are below ground level.
Deep breath now. There are six separate entrances on four different levels and, if all that is a little confusing, fear not - the Dundrum car park is not only able to guide you to an emptly parking bay at break-neck speed but will tell you how to get back to your car when you've forgotten where you put it after three hours shopping.
It also employs 120 staff including a manager and a "mobility manager" to keep things moving swiftly. It pretty much breaks every record that exists for car parks and its designers claim it is most technologically advanced car park in the world. And that's only phase one.
Phase two, to be completed in 2008, will see another 1,800 spaces come into operation.
"The only way to create the car park was to blast through 60 metres of pure granite," says Don Nugent, director of the centre. "This took nine months to complete."
The stragegy was to get people parked quickly as possible and off the road network, he says by way of explaining the number of entrances at different levels. "Once you drive in, our electronic systems come into play."
There are no fewer than three systems in place to speed up parking and exiting and helping the helpless find their lost vehicles.
The first system, the ticket and barrier, is familiar to anybody who has been in a car over the past 15 years or so. The second is less familiar but excruciatingly simple in design and goes something like this: each parking bay has a movement sensor and so "knows" when a car is parked in it. When it is occupied a red light illuminates above it. When it's free the light is green, meaning a quick scan will tell a driver where a space is available.
"This lets us achieve our key objective of getting people parked quickly," explains Nugent.
The information collected by the sensors is sent to signs telling customers how many spaces are free on a particular level and on the next one up. The information, in turn, is sent to signs positioned on the road network on the approach of the shopping centre.
If a car is left in a bay for an extended period an orange light is displayed to alert the operators that a car may have been abandoned. In fairness, though, you would want to be a couple of Toyota parts short of a Lexus to abandon a car in Dundrum shopping centre of all places. Why?
The third system in place is, as it were, the eyes and ears of the place - it's the Automated Numberplate Recognition System (ANRS).
"When you drive off the road network, your car is photographed," explains Nugent. "When you drive onto a level, your car is photographed again."
If you leave that level a new picture is taken when you arrive on the next level, and so on until you park. The system then "knows" the number, model and colour of your car, the time you came in and which level you parked on.
Nugent explains: "When you take your ticket out at the paystation it will say 'you are parked on level 2 or whatever'. We had somebody on the first week of opening who couldn't find his car - the ticket was in the car and he couldn't remember his registration number. We found the car in less than a minute."
Astonighingly ANRS can search, not only for a particular registration number and tell the operators where it is, but also for cars using criteria such as make, colour and time of day it came in. For example, it could search all the red Volvos that came in between 11am and 2pm and say where each was in the complex.
"People get worried that it's like big brother but the information is used and then done away with," Nugent adds.
"We have nothing that is not in the public domain. Tracking registration numbers is for the purpose of tracing cars only. The information does disapper off the system, and we don't keep it indefinitely".
ANRS will no doubt have picked us up on its cameras last weekend, arms stretched with bags, struggling to find the car on level -1, Red Zone. Many thanks to the people in the yellow neon coats who kindly directed me to Betsie.
We were not alone in our confusion, says Nugent. "There's always an element of familiarisation involved given the scale and complexity of the car park. But we are getting fewer and fewer queries and have had a good positive response to the car park."