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Stand By Your Van
1 January 2005

Garage music: US car parks play music from
Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin

Would you like Tammy Wynette or Dean Martin to help you find your vehicle? That's what happens in America, reports Chloe Veltman

Forlorn shoppers unable to remember if they parked the car on level G3 or H4 of the local multistorey may have found relief lately, with eye-catching images of flowers, trees and animals on the walls of some UK car parks, helping drivers distinguish between otherwise nondescript concrete floors.

But American drivers don't have to settle for simple visual clues to navigate the oft-confusing course back to their cars - they're being offered an entire multimedia experience by the multi-billion-dollar parking industry.

At a vast multistorey in downtown Chicago that provides parking for about 5,000 vehicles on the average weekday, patrons are calling upon the vocal talents of Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra and Barbra Streisand to help them locate their Ford Mustangs and Chrysler Sebring Sedans.

Each of the 10 floors of the Huron/St Clair car park is kitted out with a system of musical memory aids. Patrons entering and exiting the first floor lobby, for instance, are prompted to remember where they parked by hearing Neil Diamond's The Best Years of Our Lives pumped through speakers by the lift doors.

There's a different artist and song on every floor: on level four, Sinatra croons One for my Baby, on the seventh floor, Tammy Wynette's Stand By Your Man echoes across the lobby, and, on the top level, Louis Armstrong's Stardust rattles the rafters. Besides the songs, each level is signposted with pictures of the corresponding artist's album cover.

Standard Parking Corporation, a Chicago-based parking management company that runs 1,900 car parks in 278 cities across North America, including the Huron/St Clair garage, began equipping car parks with musical themes back in the mid-1980s. A variety of genres is offered, from Broadway shows and sports teams to cities and universities. At another Chicago car park, colourful Big Ben signs and a looped recording of The Beatles' I Want to Hold Your Hand are supposed to help patrons remember where they parked by thinking of England, while images of the Leaning Tower of Pisa accompanied by Dean Martin's song That's Amore give the ninth floor its Italian theme.

"People would frequently tell us that they'd forgotten where they'd parked," says Steve Warshauer, executive vice- president of operations for Standard Parking. "We wanted to find a way to help people find their cars, so we decided to marry music and graphics to create an easy-to-remember system." The management still encourages customers to write down the location of their vehicles, but as few bother to do this, the music acts as a useful prompt. "People can just focus on the music rather than worry about where they left their cars," says Jim Healy, who manages the Huron/St Clair garage.

According to the latest parking industry study from Florida-based research firm Marketdata Enterprises, more than 1,200 new car parks, worth $4·9 billion, have been constructed since 1998. Marketdata also predicts a 5·4 per cent industry growth rate for the coming year.

As the number of car parks increases to meet higher demand in major cities, entrepreneurs are coming up with all sorts of high- and low-tech ways to reunite stationary vehicles with their drivers. The Personal Park Navigator, a walkie-talkie-esque homing device by the San Jose, California-based technology company SiRF combines a Global Positioning System with wireless technology to pinpoint a car's location remotely.

More pedestrian (but considerably less expensive) systems touted on internet chat-rooms and blogs include parking in the same place and tying something colourful to the vehicle.

While hearing Rolf Harris' Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport on the Australia-themed level of a Chicago car park might be something most drivers would sooner forget, some customers find the musical memory aides useful. "The music really helps. With the sheer amount of floors, I would never be able to remember where I left my car," says Stephen Frappier, a 27-year-old medical equipment salesman, standing outside the level-nine lift in the Huron/St Clair car park after a sales call (the car park is right next to a busy hospital). "I don't have to remember I'm on the ninth floor, I just think Billie Holiday."

Although Standard Parking's efforts to offset customer amnesia are commendable, there is little evidence to suggest that the patented musical system is more than a mildly useful gimmick, offered alongside such quirky amenities as free umbrellas and video rentals by the company. The $100,000 cost of implementing a musical theme system seems like small change in comparison with the cost of building a new car park, which stands at about $30 million in Chicago, according to Warshauer. Yet fewer than 20 of Standard Parking's 1,900 locations offer the service. "The cost of this stuff over the lifespan of a garage is peanuts," says Healy. "But when you're building a new facility, it all adds up."

Not everyone is as keen on the system as Stephen Frappier. Kelly Kennedy, a 32-year-old hospital patient on her way to a doctor's appointment, doesn't object to the use of music at the Huron/St Clair garage per se, but would rather obtain car-park positioning assistance from the Rolling Stones and Dave Matthews Band than Johnny Mathis and Bing Crosby. "This music is what old people listen to," she says. Nutritionist Lynn Danford had even stronger objections. "I am capable of finding the location of my car without this," she says. "I don't like being exposed to involuntary music. I wish they'd turn it off."