page_title: Multistorey car park
section_title: Design
hierarchical_section_title: Multistorey car park / Design
caption_attribution_description: English: Digital photo taken by Marc Averette. Met 2 in Downtown Miami, Florida, United States.
context_page_description: A multistory car park or parking garage is a building designed for car parking and where there are a number of floors or levels on which parking takes place. It is essentially an indoor, stacked car park. Parking structures may be heated if they are enclosed.
  Design of parking structures can add considerable cost for planning new developments, and can be mandated by cities or states in new building parking requirements. Some cities such as London have abolished previously enacted minimum parking requirements.
context_section_description: The movement of vehicles between floors can take place by means of:
  interior ramps – the most common type
  exterior ramps – which may take the form of a circular ramp (colloquially known as a 'whirley-gig' in America)
  vehicle lifts (or elevators) – the least common
  automated robot systems – combination of ramp and elevator
  Where the car park is built on sloping land, it may be split-level or have sloped parking.
  Many car parks are independent buildings dedicated exclusively to that use. The design loads for car parks are often less than the office building they serve (50 psf versus 80 psf), leading to long floor spans of 55–60 feet that permit cars to park in rows without supporting columns in between. The most common structural systems in the United States for these structures are either prestressed concrete double-tee floor systems or post-tensioned cast-in-place concrete floor systems.
  In recent times, car parks built to serve residential and some business properties have been built as part of a larger building, often underground as part of the basement, such as the parking lot at the Atlantic Station redevelopment in Atlanta.  This saves land for other uses (as opposed to a car park), is cheaper and more practical in most cases than a separate structure, and is hidden from view.  It protects customers and their cars from weather such as rain, snow, or hot summer sunshine that raises a vehicle's interior temperature to extremely high levels. Underground parking of only two levels was considered an innovative concept in 1964, when developer Louis Lesser developed a two-level underground parking structure under six 10-storey high-rise residential halls at California State University, Los Angeles, which lacked space for horizontal expansion in the 176-acre (0.71 km²) university.  The simple two-level parking structure was considered unusual enough in 1964 that a separate newspaper section entitled "Parking Underground" described the parking lot as an innovative "concept" and as "subterranean spaces". In Toronto, a 2,400 space parking lot below Nathan Phillips Square is one of the world's largest.
  Car parks which serve shopping centres can be built adjacent to the centre for easier access at each floor between shops and parking. One example is Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, USA, which has two large parking lots attached to the building, at the eastern and western ends. A common position for car parks within shopping centres in the UK is on the roof, around the various utility systems, enabling customers to take lifts straight down into the centre. Examples of such are The Oracle in Reading and Festival Place in Basingstoke.
  These car parks often have low ceiling clearances, which restrict access by full-size vans and other large vehicles. On 15 December 2013, a man was killed during a robbery in the parking garage at The Mall at Short Hills in Millburn, New Jersey. The paramedics responding to the shooting were delayed because their ambulance was too large to enter the structure.
  In the United States, costs for parking garages are estimated to cost between $25,000 per space, with underground parking costing around $35,000 per space.
caption: A large, mostly enclosed multi-storey car park forms the base or "pedestal" of two connected high rises. At nearly 20 stories and over 200 feet (61 m), it is an exceptionally large car park that comprises a significant portion of the building.
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