I don’t know if it’s an American thing or not, but I’d be willing to bet it is: we expect perfection a lot more often than it’s realistically possible. Let’s just say we expect it for two hours a day, when 5 minutes is about all that we’re ever going to get. I know the perfection of a day at the beach or a hike in the mountains, but I don’t know the perfection of a car that never breaks down or weather that never spoils my plans. Parkers, in particular, expect their experiences to be perfect, despite the fact that they involve other human beings, complicated infrastructure, and developing technology.
In Miami, a robotic garage in a condominium is delivering a much less than perfect experience for residents, reports miamiherald.com. People who live at Brickell House say the $16 million robotic parking system is making them wait for up to an hour on busy weekday mornings.
“I’ve already been late to several, important board meetings at work,” said Beatriz Guerrero, a marketing executive who moved into the tower at 1300 Brickell Bay Drive two months ago. “I’m worried about losing my job.”
The condo’s ownership is planning to shut down the system down over Memorial Day to make improvements that will address the logjam.
“The way I see it is no different from when the first iPhone came out,” said Harvey Hernandez, the building’s developer. “How many updates did you have to do to fix every little issue? It was brand new technology. So is this.”
“The issues are not a surprise to us because we knew that once the occupancy of the building increased there were going to be things we needed to adjust,” Hernandez continued. “We’re learning the parking behavior of the residents.”
But people don’t like to be guinea pigs. If you promise them a robotic parking garage that delivers their car in 10 minutes, that’s what the expect, and you can’t really blame them. It will be better for their blood pressure if they learn to live with imperfection, and wait for all the kinks to be worked out, but that’s asking a lot when what they’d rather do is sue you.
The New Jersey-based company called Boomerang Systems that built the system at Brickell House has already been sued for a garage system that didn’t meet the expectations of its owners. Adapting a robotic garage to the needs of its users while they are using it seems like a reasonable plan through the eyes of the developer, but for the user, it’s a broken promise.
Read the rest of the article here.
One Response
“It was brand new technology. So is this.” Hardly, the Kent Automatic Garage opened in New York in 1928, nearly 100 years ago. that Garage parked 1,000 cars and seemed to manage to keep working until the 1950’s