Lost Medieval Church Discovered

The hunt for King Richard III is on and archaeologists think they may have found his grave underneath a church parking lot. Read the full story here.

Lost Medieval Church Discovered Beneath Parking Lot

By: Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience Senior Writer

The hunt for King Richard III's grave is heating up, with archaeologists announcing today (Sept. 5) that they have located the church where the king was buried in 1485.

"The discoveries so far leave us in no doubt that we are on the site of Leicester's Franciscan Friary, meaning we have crossed the first significant hurdle of the investigation," Richard Buckley, the lead archaeologist on the dig, said in a statement.

Buckley and his colleagues have been excavating a parking lot in Leicester, England, since Aug. 25. They are searching for Greyfriars church, said to be the final resting place of Richard III, who died in battle during the War of the Roses, an English civil war. A century later, Shakespeare would immortalize Richard III in a play of the same name.

After his death in the Battle of Bosworth Field, Richard III was brought to Leicester and buried at Greyfriars. The location of the grave, and the church itself, was eventually lost to history, though University of Leicester archaeologists traced the likely location to beneath the parking lot for the Leicester City Council offices.

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5 Kid Safety Suggestion for Kids Playing in Parking Lots

Offbeat Mama, an online blog about parenting against the grain, has a blog post about suggestions for kids to play safely when your "yard" is a parking lot. To read the full article click here. 

5 suggestions for playing safely when your "yard" is a parking lot
Guestpost By ASHLEY

It's April 2011: my two-year-old is snoring in the backseat. I follow the landlords into the apartment complex, noting the "Slow! Children at Play!" signs at both entrances. I spied the little nook where everyone's bikes and outdoor wheeled toys were jammed together. I ask if there are other families — yes — and are there any noise complaints — no, but the bar across the street can get riled up at peak times. After two years of being parents in college-oriented complexes, I was ready for a place that seemed more family-friendly. Except for the weird amount of grass between the ten buildings, it was perfect.

Oh, how I've wished for more grass! I grew up in military housing, where the houses are duplexes and everyone's yards are smushed together into these huge patches of grass. We ran around with bare feet and more than once ran into the wrong back door. But here? Two of the buildings have smushed patches behind them that could count as yards — one unit inexplicably has a back door, even — but it's not in a place where the kids can really play safely and supervised. What's the alternative? The parking lot? With cars?!

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The World's 18 Strangest Parking Garages

The World's 18 Strangest Parking Garages

By: Popular Mechanics 

Parking garages are often architectural afterthoughts. Monolithic and utilitarian, they rarely offer more than the necessary housing of cars for other more aesthetic structures. "It's an expense a developer generally doesn't like, but it is a necessary evil to make his development successful," says Len Tsupros, president of Carl Walker Construction, a design firm that specializes in parking garages. However, as cities become larger and as transportation technology changes, the role and function of the parking garage has to be redefined. Here are some of the world's most interesting, innovative and just plain bizarre parking garages.

Car Silos at the Autostadt
Location: Wolfsburg, Germany
Background:
Volkswagen's Autostadt—an automotive-themed amusement park—includes a car museum, driving courses, car-factory tours and these 20-story car silos.

Why It's Unique:
European VW buyers can opt to pick up their cars from the robotic car silo instead of the dealership—the automation ensures they will receive a car with an odometer that reads zero. After spending a day enjoying the park, customers watch the central robotic arm travel up the tower and choose their vehicle from the beehive of cars.

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Reinventing the Parking Garage

Departures.com has an interesting article on a Miami parking garage that has been reinvented and given a brand new look. You can read the entire article here.

Reinventing the Parking Garage

By: Departures.com

Zaha Hadid is the latest in a series of starchitects to design a garage in Miami Beach.

When a delegation from Miami Beach flew to Art Basel in Switzerland last June looking for architectural inspiration for new city projects, they ended up with a plan for a parking garage. But not just any garage: a floating figure eight designed by world-renowned starchitect Zaha Hadid. At the Art Basel design fair, Miami Beach mayor Matti Bower and city manager Jorge Gonzalez got a close look at some of Hadid’s recent work and were especially drawn to the public green spaces in her plans for Seoul’s Dongdaemun Design Plaza & Park. So when the commission for a $13 million garage at Miami Beach’s Collins Park came up soon after, they asked Hadid to enter the competition. It was no surprise that she won—her stunning form-based plan and presentation is legendary—but what was shocking was that she and a roster of world-renowned international architects, from Daniel Libeskind to Robert A.M. Stern, would compete head to head to build something as quotidian as a parking structure.

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How to Make a Parking Garage Energy Efficient

RenewableEnergyWorld.com has an article about the how to make a parking garage energy efficient. You can read the entire article here.

How to Make a Parking Garage Energy Efficient
By Heather Lammers, NREL





WASHINGTON, D.C. -- It's no secret that researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) do cool things — including finding new ways to capture energy from the sun and wind. But there's nothing cooler than working on a parking garage, right?

"It doesn't sound glamorous, but it is a place for building energy savings," NREL Energy Efficiency Research Engineer Jennifer Scheib said. "A garage typically uses 15% of the energy that the building that it is designed to support uses. Many would say it's only 15% of the energy, but we'd say it's still 15% that can be improved on. For every watt you save in the building, that's $33 worth of photovoltaics you don't have to buy when you are targeting net-zero energy." A net-zero energy building produces as much energy as it uses over the course of a year.

NREL bid the parking garage and accompanying site entrance building for the lab's expanded campus using the same streamlined design-build process that was leveraged in the construction of the Research Support Facility (RSF). The team of RNL and Haselden Construction partnered with NREL to build these new energy-efficient facilities.

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Envisioning the Future of Parking

Parking Matters has a great article about the future of parking and the role parking lots play in society, from encouraging economic activity to making neighborhoods more livable, specifically in Eugene. You can read the entire article here.

Envisioning the Future: Parking’s Role
By Jeff Perty

Parking Enforcement Officer: Duties Performed

Enhances neighborhood livability and encourages economic activity.
Provides assistance and general information to a diverse population.
Works independently and exercises flexibility, dependability, good judgment, and a positive attitude.

These are the first three duties of a parking enforcement officer with the City of Eugene, Ore. They are also the priorities we want our officers to focus on. Parking enforcement is about people, not license plates. By focusing on customers, we change the perception of enforcement officers from ticket-writing vultures to city ambassadors.

This year’s IPI Conference & Expo featured a continual thread of sessions that aligned with one of our key priorities: enhance neighborhood livability and encourage economic activity. I learned about Calgary’s willingness to allow taxis in their fire hydrant zones (read more about this in the upcoming September issue of The Parking Professional), UNC Greensboro’s 12-step intervention for parkaholics, and adapting the service industry’s blueprinting tool at Arizona State University and the University of Chicago. I could name more, but there is not enough room here!

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We Do Lines Featured on CNBC.com

The article from the Huffington Post that We Do Lines was prominently featured in has also been picked up by CNBC.com! If you haven't already, be sure to read the story on how workers are coping with the high temperatures throughout the country.

Heat Wave Takes Toll On Small Businesses
By Janean Chun, Huffington Post

With the latest heat wave alone having claimed 46 lives across the country, Chris Couri, co-founder, president and CEO of We Do Lines, said their workers take precautions, including wearing reflective clothing, hats and collared shirts; drinking plenty of water; and taking breaks to sit in their trucks and blast the air conditioning. "We have to listen to our bodies and, if we feel the effects of the heat, to sit down and take care of that immediately," Couri said.

Though Couri said working in record-breaking heat means slowing down the pace and "not trying to set any world records" to finish a job, he acknowledged that the heat is actually good for business. "We have to take advantage of the weather if it's hot and dry, which are the best conditions for what we do," he said.

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