Richard Hartog / LAT

THE PLAN: If the L.A. City Council votes yes, parking meters will be installed along such busy streets as Sunset Boulevard in the Sunset Junction area. Silver Lake would get 500 more meters.

First came the trendy clothing boutiques and vintage furniture stores that opened next to laundromats and liquor stores on Sunset Boulevard in Silver Lake.

Then came the upscale eateries and patio cafes.

Now comes the parking enforcement officer.

The city is moving forward with a plan to quadruple the number of parking meters in all of Silver Lake, mostly along the burgeoning business districts of Sunset, Glendale and Silver Lake boulevards.

Some merchants cheer the idea of adding 500 meters, saying it will help customers find parking in an area notoriously short on spaces. But some residents worry that the meters will mean less parking for them — and pressure on the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood.

“It seems like it is becoming like every other place that becomes bourgeois,” said Tristan Saether, 24, a bartender who lives and works in the meter-free Sunset Junction neighborhood in the heart of Silver Lake. “It’s one more step toward high rent.”

Merchants and residents say parking problems have reached unbearable levels in Silver Lake. Along Sunset Boulevard, the competition for parking is fierce, causing motorists to travel up residential side streets in search of spaces.

“Parking is so bad already,” said Kelly Van Patter, who opened an environmentally themed home and garden shop in Sunset Junction two weeks ago. “It’s tough to find a spot as it is.”

Sean Eisele, 22, said he had to park 10 blocks from his home on Sunday. He arrived home at 9 p.m., forcing him to compete with visitors to the area’s restaurants.

“You have to dance around with your car,” said Eisele, a recent transplant from Philadelphia.

There’s a lot to attract shoppers to the new Silver Lake, with its heart in Sunset Junction — so named because it served as the rail car junction that once connected Sunset Boulevard and Santa Monica Boulevard.

On a recent evening, next to a Salvadoran pupuseria, a line of people filled Pazzo Gelato, with its huge windows and bright facade acting as a beacon for Sunset Junction. Farther east were boutique shops filled with shoes and a comic books store with shiny hardwood floors that doubles as an art gallery.

Diners chatted at an upscale microbrewery, an Indian restaurant that offers valet parking, and a packed organic vegan restaurant and deli.

Store owners say the problem is that workers or residents sometimes park on Sunset Boulevard for hours, making it difficult for customers to find street parking.

“These cars end up sitting for hours on end,” said David Ritchie, a co-owner of Secret Headquarters, a comic books store and gallery.

He admits he also has sometimes parked for several hours on Sunset.

But for the customers’ sake, he said, “It’d be nice if we got some turnover out there.”

That’s why merchants say they asked the City Council to add parking meters. The city’s transportation committee approved the idea Wednesday, with the council to vote on it in coming weeks. Under the proposal, the meters would operate from 8 a.m. to 8 or 10 p.m., Monday through Saturday.

Peter Choi, a past Silver Lake Chamber of Commerce chairman and owner of Serifos, a gift shop, said he often hears customers say, “I meant to stop by the other day, but I couldn’t find a spot, so I just went home.”

One- or two-hour parking limits aren’t rigorously enforced by the city. Parking meters are expected to make it easier for shoppers to get a shot at street parking, Choi said.

“They’ll have a better chance of stopping in front of a business and picking up a gift, a bottle of wine or a hunk of cheese,” Choi said.

In Silver Lake, much of the parking crunch is caused by new shoppers and new residents who, Choi said, are living in homes built in the 1920s or ’30s that might have only a one-car garage.

When the neighborhood was built, he said, most residents took the now-defunct Red Car trolley line to jobs in Hollywood because automobiles were unaffordable.

“You have all these little cottages packed in Silver Lake and there’s no parking for a lot of them,” Choi said. “Now you have exponentially more cars coming in as the neighborhood got more gentrified after the ’90s. It went from bus riders to gentrified couples with cars.

“The neighborhood was not really designed for cars. It was designed for Red Car trolley-riding 1920s Angelenos and not for the post-millennial double-car garage culture,” Choi said.

But the prospect of meters worries Fred Davis, a 60-year-old apartment manager who has lived in Silver Lake for 12 years.

“I don’t go for the parking meters; that’s like downtown, the Westside, Hollywood or around Santa Monica,” Davis said, adding that he enjoyed the area’s laissez faire attitude toward parking.

Sarah Dale, who runs Pull My Daisy, a clothing boutique in Sunset Junction, agreed. She said there is something to be said about Silver Lake as an off-the-radar neighborhood, an alternative to the glitz of the beach culture — home to gay businesses, musicians and eclectic, independent stores.

“The less the parking meters, the better the world,” Dale said. “I do think our little drag is really sweet. . . . I think there’s something great about parking your car, going to get lunch,” and then browsing at shops along the street — “without being under the gun to come back and feed the meter.”

Whatever may come, resident Anja Gardner fears that the neighborhood is losing its edgy distinctiveness.

“It’s not quite as quaint as it used to be,” said Gardner, 25, as she headed into a gelato shop on a recent warm night. “More money means less hip. That’s the way it is.”

ron.lin@latimes.com

Christian Charisius/Reuters

A new Volkswagen Golf V is stored with other new cars awaiting owners at the Autostadt in Wolfsburg, Germany.

IT was just a patch of black asphalt, but for the weary Manhattan motorist orbiting the narrow streets of Chinatown, it glimmered like an oasis in the Sahara.

Another awe-inspiring view of the the Autostadt center.

Moscow Architects
Pez dispensers inspired Keith Moskow’s garage design for a car-sharing service.

 

For years, Michael Schneeweiss of MGS Parking Management presided over that patch, dispatching attendants to greet parkers so happy to find a spot that they almost forgot to grumble about the rates.

But now the lot is gone. Reversing Joni Mitchell’s lyrics, the developers pulled up a parking lot and put in a paradise — a luxury condo development at 123 Baxter Street whose amenities include Internet-capable refrigerators.

The 100 parking spaces that Mr. Schneeweiss managed have been replaced, below the 24 condos, by 74 spots in New York City’s first automated parking garage. Two dozen spaces will be reserved for apartment owners. Starting Thursday, the rest will be open to the public — first for monthly lessees and, come spring, for drive-ins.

The project is the work of AutoMotion Parking Systems, the American subsidiary of Stolzer Parkhaus of Strassburg, Germany. Stolzer Parkhaus has built 28 automated garages in 11 countries since its first, in Kronach, Germany, in 1996. The software and hardware that moves the cars around in the garages were adapted from systems that store materials in warehouses.

“This is the future,” Mr. Schneeweiss said during a recent tour of the Chinatown garage, shaking his head as if he did not quite believe it yet.

But the future is coming on fast in cities like New York, where shiny towers are rising over what had long been parking lots. “There is a proliferation of high-rise condo construction in major urban areas,” said Donald R. Monahan, vice president of Walker Parking Consultants in Greenwood Village, Colo., who follows innovations in the business closely. “Usually these have small footprints that do not offer enough room for traditional garages.”

Not only are developers looking at automated garages, city planners and architects are discussing new ideas to manage automobiles, even when stationary. Urban theorists and policy makers are increasingly looking at the effects of parking on traffic, development, pollution and energy efficiency. Smart parking could save energy.

Mr. Schneeweiss, a parking industry veteran who wears a jaunty racing cap, and Ari Milstein, planning director for AutoMotion, showed off the Baxter Street garage. A driver pulls off the street into a room roughly the size of a one-car garage attached to a house. The car rests on a large pallet, a traylike area with shallow troughs for the wheels.

“Lasers check that the car is aligned,” Mr. Milstein said, and determines that it is not one of the trucks or S.U.V.’s too big for the garage. The driver locks the car, takes the keys and picks up an electronic card from a nearby machine. A large door closes behind the car; motion detectors ensure that no children or pets are left behind.

Then the pallet holding the car slides below ground level, into two subterranean floors of storage.

“It’s simple — park, swipe and leave,” Mr. Milstein said.

The returning driver pays — using a credit card at a machine, or handing cash to the human “parking concierge” in a booth. The machinery retrieves the pallet holding the car, which rises to ground level, pointing toward the exit. You unlock the doors and drive away.

“You get your car in under three minutes,” Mr. Milstein promises. “It’s as easy as an A.T.M. or E-ZPass.” Rates will be comparable to conventional parking in Manhattan, he said, about $400 a month.

For the driver, the advantages of an automated system go beyond convenience and speed. The car remains untouched and unopened, and with the parking area ostensibly off limits to people, valuables are safe inside. Assuming the mechanized parts are functioning right, the car avoids potential scrapes and bumps. Seats and mirrors remain as you left them; the radio will still be tuned to, say, Lite FM. There is no tipping.

“You can even go shopping,” Mr. Milstein said, “bring things back to your car, lock them in the trunk and go on shopping.”

For the developer, automated garages offer cost advantages in construction and operation. By omitting ramps and walkways, about twice as many cars can be tucked into the space. Labor and insurance costs are lower, and getting cars in and out is faster.

Michael Stolzer, dispatched from Stolzer Parkhaus in Germany to help set up the new garage, showed off the computerized control area and the storage floors. The cars on their pallets can be stacked more tightly than those in a traditional garage; clearance in the storage cubicles is only roof-high, not human-head high.

The design recalls the way bakeries stack goods on racks: car cakes on trays.

AutoMotion has built only one previous project in the United States, a 74-space automated garage at the Summit Grand Parc, a luxury residential building in Washington, not far from the White House. But the company has three more projects under way in the New York area, Mr. Milstein said.

Automated garages are much more common in Europe and Asia, said John Van Horn, editor and publisher of Parking Today, a magazine, Web site and blog based in Los Angeles. “There are thousands of them in Europe,” he said. “There is one on practically every corner in Japan. In the U.S., it has mostly been a matter of European technology licensed to people who don’t understand the parking industry.”

But the Baxter Street project is different, said Mr. Van Horn, who visited the site this month. “With the technology and the footprint there, it should be viable,” he said. There are economic incentives: a traditional garage on the site could have held only 24 cars, too few to be feasible. And, he noted, AutoMotion is affiliated with one of the building’s developers, the American Development Group.

An earlier and much publicized automated project in Hoboken helped to raise doubts about such operations. Opened in 2002, the Garden Street garage was designed by Robotic Parking Systems of Clearwater, Fla. In 2004, a Cadillac dropped several floors in the garage and a Jeep suffered a similar fate a year later. Jeff Faria, a spokesman for Robotic Parking, said the problems resulted from factors other than the garage’s equipment.

Mr. Van Horn said publicity about the Hoboken garage made developers wary of such projects.

Parking is a $26 billion industry, according to the International Parking Institute in Fredericksburg, Va. The institute says there are about 40,000 parking garages and other facilities with 105 million spaces.

In “Park It! NYC 2007 ” (Park It! Guides) Margot J. Tohn says there are 1,110 off-street parking garages and lots in Manhattan, with 104,000 spaces.

That, most motorists would say, is not enough. According to surveys done by the National Parking Association, a trade organization based in Washington, the average cost of building a parking spot averages about $14,000 nationally and about $18,000 in the New York area.

Donald C. Shoup, an urban planning professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, is an advocate of reform of zoning and building code requirements for off-street parking. In his book, “The High Cost of Free Parking” (American Planning Association), he contends that local regulations have distorted the shape of cities by subsidizing the automobile and penalizing people without cars, who tend to be less affluent. He has been embraced by the new urbanists and those who advocate “congestion pricing” tolls on city streets and highways.

Information technology could make parking easier and more efficient. At many airports and on the edges of some European cities, overhead digital signs display information about available spaces in parking decks. Various plans have been offered for finding and reserving parking spots by mobile phone or the Internet.

Professor Shoup argues for market-based parking, with rates that vary by the time of day or the season. Some planners advocate a high-tech, socially networked system of pricing — a spot market for parking spots. One start-up company exploring a system to reserve and rent spots is SpotScout (spotscout.com).

Proponents of automated parking like to compare their garages with vending machines. Long frustrated by the homeliness of traditional decks — dim places suitable for mob executions or reporters’ meetings with Deep Throats — architects have taken inspiration from the vending machine to reimagine future garages.

In Europe, Smart dealerships display stacks of the lovable little cars in glass structures, as attractive as snacks. At Volkswagen’s Autostadt customer center in Wolfsburg, Germany, where many buyers pick up their new cars, two silolike glass towers hold cars fresh from the factory. These are robotically retrieved by a central elevator and delivered to the customers waiting below, adding drama to the handover of the keys.

Inspired by Pez candy dispensers, Keith Moskow, of Moskow Architects in Boston, has sketched a concept for a see-through automated garage for car-sharing services like Zipcar. A German company, CarLoft (carloft.de), is building an apartment tower in Berlin that lets residents park their cars on their balconies. A New York architect, Annabelle Selldorf, has offered a similar vision for a Manhattan building with elevators that would let tenants drive their cars into garages next to their high-rise apartments.

The Smart Cities project of the Media Lab of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has suggested a variety of possible visions of future parking. Smart parking places could signal their availability electronically to passing motorists. Ryan Chin, Mitchell Joachim and other researchers at the Media Lab propose to redesign vehicles to make them easier to park — the spatial demands of parking could be reduced by six to eight times, they argue, with small cars that nest together like grocery carts.

WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif.

J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times

Customers line up to top yogurt with fruit at the Pinkberry store in the Westwood section of Los Angeles.

J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times

The chain now has many rivals.

CONDEMNATIONS have been made. Mildly menacing Internet comments have been exchanged. A lawsuit and a police report have been filed. Multitudes of parking altercations have occurred, with government officials summoned.

Yes, frozen yogurt is back.

For the past year, congeries of women in Ugg boots have lined up outside a chain of shops called Pinkberry to get a taste of Los Angeles’s newest take on the airy, low-fat treat of yore. Otherwise reasonable people have hopped from illegally parked cars and waited as long as an hour to get a little cup of sour yogurt, in two flavors, plain and green tea, often topped with fresh fruit, or, inexplicably, Fruity Pebbles cereal.

Pinkberry’s original store has drawn the ire of its West Hollywood neighbors after nearly a year of parking dramas and lawns dotted with small paper cups bearing little pink swirls.

The company’s squabbles with the competitors that have sprouted around town have been the subject of fierce debate on Los Angeles food blogs and more than a dozen news articles in the local press. The rivals have plans to expand into Las Vegas and Florida. Meanwhile a company in Korea claims that it was the inspiration for Pinkberry.

Undeterred, Pinkberry has marched on with its own expansion, opening nine new stores in Los Angeles County over the last three months, and three in New York.

How has frozen yogurt, the leg warmer of food trends, managed to stage such a showy comeback?

When frozen yogurt was introduced in the 1970s, the American public was largely unwilling to countenance its tart taste. In the 1980s, the chains The Country’s Best Yogurt (now TCBY) and I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt added flavors and sugars, creating cloyingly sweet and chalky products.

Consumers were charmed by this low-fat, lower-calorie alternative to ice cream and its odious cousin, ice milk. Sales of frozen yogurt soared over 200 percent a year from the mid 1980s until the early 1990s.

But then a wave of new reduced-fat ice creams turned up and “frozen yogurt started to take a dive,” said Steven Young, a food technologist and an ice cream expert who runs a consulting firm in Houston.

In 2005, 65 million gallons of frozen yogurt were produced in the United States, a significant decline from 1990, when 117.6 million gallons of the stuff was made, according to the International Dairy Foods Association.

The frozen yogurt that has taken Los Angeles by storm resembles the early, sour frozen yogurt more than its artificially flavored progeny. And the current craze seems to spring from Korea, where a company called Red Mango started selling sour-style yogurt in 2004.

Its 150 stores offer frozen yogurt made from a powdered base imported from Italy. “We call it natural, authentic yogurt,” said Brandon Jo, chief executive officer of Red Mango Inc., the company’s North American unit, which is opening its first American store in Westwood this April.

Around the same time Red Mango got started, Shelly Hwang and her boyfriend, Young Lee, who are both from Korea, were attempting to open a tea parlor in West Hollywood. When the neighborhood rejected their application for a liquor license, the two switched gears. In early 2005, Pinkberry was born.

Mr. Lee said there is nothing Korean about the idea, but Pinkberry closely resembles Red Mango: two flavors only, plain and green tea, served with toppings such as strawberries, sweetened cereals, coconut and, if one knows to ask, mochi — Japanese sticky rice. (“We don’t put that out,” Mr. Lee said. “It is kind of like going to In-N-Out Burger and ordering ‘animal style.’ ”)

By spring of 2006, Pinkberry was so successful that neighbors of its original shop began to complain about parking and litter to the West Hollywood City Council. The store was ordered to shorten its evening hours and place guards in front to help control the crowds. Employees began to pick up litter.

Yet some neighbors want the store’s license revoked. The city is trying to facilitate a compromise, and officials believe the spread of Pinkberry locations across Los Angeles may ease the traffic at the original store, said Susan Healy Keene, the director of community development for West Hollywood.

In the meantime, Pinkberry competitors have opened all over town.

There is Kiwiberri, and Fiore, in the Japanese Village Plaza downtown. Seeking the entrance to a parking structure in Westwood recently, I was momentarily stymied by a tiny shop called Snowberry, which was selling, well, you know.

In November, a shop called Berri Good opened in Fairfax, with kosher certification and a chartreuse-and-pink logo that is barely distinguishable from Pinkberry’s.

“I don’t think we’re the same,” said Uzi Moses, the owner of Berri Good. “We use different fonts.” On top of that, he said, “You know we have celebrities here, right? Are you aware of that?”

Watching it all unfold, Red Mango executives are half frosted and half convinced that they are getting free market research, Mr. Jo said. “We are a little annoyed but at the same time they are introducing the product category to the marketplace.”

Mr. Lee takes competition very seriously. John Bae, the owner of Kiwiberri, said that Mr. Lee had visited one of his stores puffing on a cigar and appeared to be up to something other than research.

“He came over at 11 p.m. and told me, ‘I know where you live and I’m going to get you,’ ” Mr. Bae said. He filed a police report claiming he had been threatened with “great bodily harm,” and demanded a restraining order against Mr. Lee, he said. A Los Angeles Police Department spokeswoman said that no restraining order was issued and that no criminal charges were filed. Mr. Lee denies making any threats. There has been one hearing on the matter in the city attorney’s office with another scheduled for next month.

Mr. Lee, who in turn has filed a suit charging Mr. Bae with copying his logo and other trademark infringements, said that he did not like his competitor’s business practices and filed the lawsuit to “teach them a lesson.” Lawyers are engaged in settlement talks, with Pinkberry’s side suggesting, among other things, that Mr. Bae change his logo and put a sign in his store stating that it has no connection to Pinkberry, and that he confess to posing as a regular yogurt lover while posting comments on food blogs under the name “yogurtfanetik.” Mr. Bae called the settlement terms “ridiculous” and denied that he is yogurtfanetik.

Lawsuits, alleged threats and crowd control issues aside, how is Pinkberry’s yogurt? Smooth, with a tangy finish to the plain. Doused with some fresh berries, it is almost addictive, and the lines at many Pinkberry locations seem understandable, even if Cap’n Crunch toppings do not. The green tea flavor is a bit more grainy and overbearing, and makes up less than 40 percent of the sales, Mr. Lee said.

Frozen yogurt’s rebirth appears to be an outgrowth of the nation’s obsession with food that offers health benefits (TCBY, looking for a revival of its own, added more live active cultures to its yogurt’s base) and of its evolving palate.

David Kim, a yoga instructor who lives in Santa Monica, is not remotely concerned about Pinkberry’s competitive issues. He gets his yogurt fix (small plain with mochi) once a week. “O.K., twice,” Mr. Kim said. “If I could, I would get it three times. It doesn’t immediately grab you, but there is something about the flavor that draws you in, and each time you go back you taste something a little bit different. The next thing you know, it’s like crack.”

Federal court clerk Chris Sawyer gave up parking in his favorite lot near Olvera Street in downtown Los Angeles last summer when the monthly rate jumped to $100 from $55.

“I couldn’t afford it,” he said, “so I had to go back to Chinatown.” But that’s where his Jeep had been broken into, and his walk to the courthouse takes twice as long from there. Soon the price at his Chinatown lot climbed from about $60 to $80 a month.

Cheap, convenient parking — as Southern Californians have long known and expected it — is getting harder to find, particularly in high-density places such as Hollywood, Santa Monica and downtown Los Angeles.

Commuters who paid as little as $80 a month in downtown Los Angeles in the early 1990s are being hit up for as much as $300 for unreserved spaces. Prefer a prime slot with your name on it? Be prepared to write a check for more than $500 a month.

Basic economics — rising demand and declining supply — explain the parking price surge.

With five years of economic growth adding a stream of new buildings and residents, many lots and garages are filling up or disappearing. Housing developers in particular have converted downtown and Hollywood lots into residential buildings. With downtown land prices now surpassing $300 a square foot, it doesn’t make economic sense to buy land just to use it for parking, consultants say.

The rise in prices also underscores the region’s transformation from an extended suburbia into a more densely occupied urban center with the kind of parking challenges more common in major metropolises such as New York or Chicago.

Nowhere is the shift more evident than in downtown Los Angeles, where acres of asphalt are giving way to housing, stores and other attractions that people want to visit — by car, of course.

Downtown prices are rising not only on standard surface lots, but also in the garages of fancy high-rise office towers as the buildings finally begin to fill with workers after many years of low occupancy.

The expectation of cheap parking has been kicked to the curb in parts of Hollywood, especially during peak weekend hours for the district’s popular nightspots. With 55 clubs in the area, parking lots intended to serve them are frequently overbooked.

“It costs $5 during the day, then $25, $40 or $50 after dark,” said Tricia LaBelle, owner of Boardner’s, a Cherokee Avenue watering hole since 1942. The scale often slides, she says, because some lot operators charge what they find the market will bear hour by hour.

Sometimes the price even hits $100 to secure prompt valet service, club operator Elizabeth Peterson said, “but $60 is usually about the most on a weekend.”

There aren’t nearly enough high rollers to go around, though, and business owners worry that high parking costs will drive away the average clubbers who have been flocking to Hollywood.

“We have seen a dip in business at many clubs because people can’t get in here,” LaBelle said. “After years of dramatic increases, business is leveling off.”

Hollywood nightclub owner and restaurateur David Gajda called the high parking prices “an absolute mess.”

“People are going to be so frustrated they are not going to come,” he said.

Eagle Rock residents Jacob Calvache and Angie Garcia got off comparatively easy late last Friday night, paying $20 to park next to the club Avalon at Hollywood and Vine.

“Everybody needs to make a profit, I guess,” Calvache said sarcastically. “It’s a little outrageous, but it’s not unexpected.”

Such price pressures could stunt Southern Californians’ storied love affair with their cars, some experts suggest, though most evidence of changes in behavior is anecdotal. Public transportation advocates say that rising costs of driving will push motorists into mass transit, especially if employers stop subsidizing their workers’ parking habits.

“People are shifting,” said Bart Reed, executive director of the Transit Coalition, a nonprofit organization based in Sylmar. “They don’t like to pay for parking. If transit can replace that need, people will choose it.”

Thousands of Los Angeles County commuters already ditch their cars at Metro Rail stations every weekday so they can hop a train to work. Although general parking is free, some stops are so crowded that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority offers reserved parking for a price.

Higher prices are translating into fatter profits for parking lot owners. Each stall on the average downtown lot grosses about $10,000 a year, said industry expert Bill Francis of Walker Parking Consultants. So a lot with 100 parking spots would bring in $1 million with very little operating costs.

“Now is a good time to be a parking operator,” Francis said.

Even with the increases, downtown Los Angeles parking prices are low compared with other downtowns, parking lot magnate Joe Lumer said. His company, L&R Investments, controls about 100 lots and garages downtown, with more than 10,000 spaces.

“In cities like San Francisco, Philadelphia, New York and Seattle it can cost as much as $40 or $50 to park,” Lumer said. “The top [daytime] rate on a surface lot downtown is $10 or $12. There is no lack of parking.”

Left to market forces, though, parking prices will continue to rise, said Los Angeles City Councilwoman Jan Perry, who represents much of downtown.

“There won’t be a lot of space left in the next five to seven years,” Perry said. “I didn’t expect this to happen so quickly.”

The city’s Community Redevelopment Agency is conducting a study that will consider abandoning a requirement, established in 1990, limiting how much parking could be included in new downtown office buildings. The intent was to compel office workers to park in structures on the edge of downtown and ride shuttle buses in. But most of them balked and signed up for cheap parking in nearby surface lots.

Other options include building the kind of massive public garages that have eased the parking burdens in Santa Monica, Beverly Hills and Pasadena.

Santa Monica’s success at creating a vibrant downtown, however, has taxed its parking resources and challenged its commitment to environment-friendly planning policies.

With its public parking structures filling up, the city has made some of its garages taller and plans to add 1,700 more spaces over the next decade, said Ellen Gelbard, deputy director of planning and community development.

In downtown Los Angeles, parking is at such a premium in the historic core that the city should enact a moratorium on further developments that take away existing lots, said Michael Delijani, whose company owns three classic but rarely used theaters on Broadway, including the Los Angeles Theater completed in 1931.

“It might even be too late already,” Delijani said, to secure enough parking sites to revive the Broadway theater district that was once the West Coast equivalent of New York’s Great White Way. Twelve major historic theaters survive, but most have no parking.

Parking lot owners are ratcheting up their fees in the area around Staples Center as that district becomes more desirable.

Maguire Properties Inc. has more than doubled monthly rates, to as much as $130, at its 2,260-space garage at Grand Avenue and Venice Boulevard. The facility was once nearly empty, its gaping floors easily visible from the San Bernardino Freeway, making it one of the city’s most notorious white elephants.

But the addition of Staples Center and new surrounding residences have made the garage desirable.

“We would have liked to have seen it happen a little sooner,” Maguire Senior Vice President Bill Flaherty said, “but now it’s generating a tremendous amount of interest.”

Student Michelle Carter walks for blocks around the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising looking for the cheapest parking, which has risen from $3 to $5 a day in the two years she has been studying product development at the campus near Staples Center.

“The closer to school it is, the more expensive it is,” she said. “It’s crazy.”

Elizabeth Berger, an office worker at the nearby Petroleum Building, said her nonprofit employer has moved staff parking four times in the last five years because prices keep going up. Now she has about a 10-minute hike through a neighborhood that still feels dicey sometimes.

Many lots near Staples have flexible pricing that rises with demand created by events at the sports venue and the Los Angeles Convention Center. Before a recent evening Tool concert, for example, the price at one Flower Street lot climbed from $5 in the daytime to $15 before the show.

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Parking on the streets of San Francisco is growing tougher and more dangerous. Tow trucks carried cars from the Embarcadero last month.

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 5 — It bears the hallmarks of a classic urban scourge: back-channel sales, assaults on enforcement officials and even death.

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

As the demand for parking spots grows, the city’s regulations become increasingly complex.

It is the price of parking in San Francisco.

Burdened with one of the densest downtowns in the country and a Californian love for moving vehicles, San Franciscans have been shocked in recent months by crimes related to finding places to park, including an attack in September in which a young man was killed trying to defend a spot he had found.

More recently, the victims have been parking control officers — do not call them meter maids — who suffered four attacks in late November, and two officers went to a hospital.

Over all, 2006 was a dangerous year for those hardy souls handing out tickets here, with 28 attacks, up from 17 in 2005.

All of which has left officials in this otherwise civilized community scrambling to explain, and solve, “parking rage.”

“It’s hard for me to understand people reacting in such a hostile manner,” said Nathaniel P. Ford Sr., executive director of the Municipal Transportation Agency, which oversees parking. “Clearly, this is a working person simply doing their job. I’ve gotten parking tickets, and I sort of slap myself on the wrist and pay the ticket.”

People in the field say abuse is common, often frightening and, occasionally, humiliating. In November, an officer was spat on, another was punched through the window of his Geo Metro, and an irate illegal parker smashed the windshield of another officer’s golf-cart-like vehicle.

“Just driving down the street, you get yelled at,” said Lawanna Preston, staff director for Local 790 of the Service Employees International Union, which represents parking control officers.

The officers are city employees but not in the Police Department.

“They can’t even eat lunch with that uniform on, because people approach them and curse at them,” Ms. Preston said.

About 75 officers demonstrated on Friday at the Hall of Justice asking for more protection.

Psychologists, planners and others familiar with the parking problems say they include underpriced meters and overloaded streets.

Officials have been looking into solutions to prevent attacks, including adding cameras to the officers’ vehicles and pepper spray to their equipment, which now includes a flashlight, a radio and, of course, the ticket pad.

District Attorney Kamala D. Harris said she was considering lobbying the state to increase the penalties for attacking parking officers.

A public service announcement warning against violence against ticket writers is to start appearing on buses this month.

Last month, the police announced the arrest of a second suspect in the killing of Boris Albinder, 19, on Sept. 16 near Golden Gate Park as he tried to save a parking space for a friend by standing in it. The authorities say Mr. Albinder was attacked by a group of men in a van who demanded that he cede the space.

Many local planners say the lack of parking is in part an unfortunate byproduct of the city’s popularity.

“Any city that is worth visiting is going to have a terrible parking problem,” said Gabriel Metcalf, executive director of the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association, a public policy center. “If you don’t want it to be Disneyland or Houston, you’re going to be experiencing a parking shortage.”

Mr. Metcalf added, however, that the density of San Francisco, with an estimated 740,000 residents in 49 square miles, also put in a different category from New York, which is also known for its parking nightmares.

“It’s too dense for people to drive easily and not dense enough for really great public transit,” he said. “So the result is frustration.”

That opinion was seconded by Donald Shoup, a professor of urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles, widely considered something of a parking theory guru. (His fans are called Shoupistas.)

Professor Shoup said the chronic lack of parking here was a result of a decision to encourage a bustling downtown free of atmosphere-killing parking lots, a phenomenon echoed in other parking-challenged — and popular — cities like Boston, Chicago and New York.

“Whenever someone from San Francisco calls to whine about the fact there’s no parking,” he said, “I always say, ‘Well, you have to choose, do you want to be more like San Francisco or more like L.A.?’ And that usually ends the conversation.”

That said, Professor Shoup noted that San Francisco had some questionable parking policies, namely cheap on-street parking and expensive garages and lots, a dynamic that encourages drivers to look endlessly for meters rather than pay for the privilege of parking off the street.

“A lot of the traffic in downtown San Francisco is people looking for curb parking,” he said. “And they’re apparently so fed up that they’re willing to assault parking officers to protest the idea of shortage of spaces.”

That frustration extends all the way to people like George Anderson, president of the American Association of Anger Management Providers, a mental health group, who said the parking problems here were so notorious that he had stopped holding paid lectures here.

“They’d be angry when they walked in,” said Mr. Anderson, a clinical social worker who lives in Los Angeles. “I’d spend half my time defending why I couldn’t include parking in the fee.”

Mr. Anderson said that his anger management patients regularly complained about the road and that not finding parking could be the last straw.

“If you’re driving on a highway,” he said, “you’re already stressed to the max. So that by the time you get to the parking stall, you end up with an inappropriate expression of anger.”

Ms. Preston of the officers’ union said many attackers had another motivation.

“They think they can take out their frustration on government in general” by abusing the officers, who work 40-hour weeks for about $40,000 a year,” she said, adding, “They say, ‘I’m tired of the city taking my money.’ ”

There certainly is money in parking tickets. San Francisco issues 1.9 million parking citations and brings in more than $40 million a year from violators, according to the transportation agency.

The city has a pilot program to scan license plates for 8,000 repeat offenders who owe an estimated $6.1 million. In addition, the city manages 41 lots and garages. It owns most of them.

Nationally, parking is a $20 billion industry, experts say, with revenues divided almost equally between public and private entities.

Private citizens have also gotten into the act, selling or trading spaces on Web sites like Craigslist, where a prime spot can bring in thousands of dollars a year.

Whitney Schmucker, 22, who lives on Nob Hill, has just agreed to pay $280 a month for a spot after advertising herself online. (“Great credit!” was a lure.)

“If you live in San Francisco, it’s not a choice of whether or not you get a parking spot,” Ms. Schmucker said in an e-mail message. “You either get one or you don’t have a car.”

Parking bloggers like John Van Horn, an editor in Los Angeles who compiles thoughts about parking on the Web site parkingtoday.typepad .com said the situation — and the attacks — in San Francisco were not unique but merely a reminder of how crazed Californians can be about all things automotive.

“I’ve noticed lately watching some of the citation writers,” Mr. Van Horn said. “They don’t get very far away from their vehicles. They want to be able to get away.”

Automatic garages may be an answer to city’s parking crunch

By Thomas C. Palmer Jr., Globe Staff | January 30, 2006

Robots already clean pools, vacuum floors, and help assemble cars. Next they will be parking cars in Boston.

With the cost of land soaring, and construction costs for a single parking space in an underground garage running between $50,000 and $70,000 in the Boston area, automated parking systems — common in congested areas of Europe and Asia — have begun to immigrate to the United States.

Two automated parking garages are operating in the United States now, a public facility in Hoboken, N.J., and a private one in Washington, D.C. More are in planning or manufacturing stages in Florida, Philadelphia, Chicago, and San Francisco.

The first automated garage in Boston is slated for Lovejoy Wharf, a condominium complex being designed for the site of two old warehouse buildings at the mouth of the Charles River, near the Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge. Construction could begin late this year.

”There are hundreds around the world,” said Robert W. Easton, principal of Ajax Management Partners LLC of Lexington, which is developing 260 residences — and 325 parking spaces — at Lovejoy Wharf. ”We are looking to be one of the first in the city.”

Automated parking garages are designed to save space, but they also take people, dents, and misplaced keys out of the parking equation.

Residents at Lovejoy Wharf would leave their vehicles on an 8-foot-long steel pallet on the floor of a one-car bay, turn off the ignition, step away, and let technology take it from there.

The pallet carries the car into the garage, moves the vehicle through the building on steel wheels and tracks, and deposits it into an available slot in a steel rack. Before parking the car, a mechanical device swivels it around 180 degrees, to speed up retrieval.

One system under consideration for Lovejoy Wharf is produced by Robotic Parking Systems Inc. of Clearwater, Fla., which offers a computerized system that relies on an off-the-shelf personal computer, Simplicity software made by General Electric Co., programmable logic controllers, wireless signals, and electronic eyes to transport vehicles in a facility.

The system memorizes residents’ use patterns and ‘’shuffles” vehicles during slow periods late at night, so early birds’ cars will be nearest the exit in the morning. Retrieval of a vehicle takes two to three minutes, and at busy times a garage, typically with two delivery bays, can deliver 80 or so an hour.

”You’re not going to be walking around a garage at night looking for your car,” said John E. Kavanagh III, president of Parking Solutions LLC, a Danvers company.

Ajax is negotiating with Parking Solutions, which has rights in New England to market and install the Robotic system. The developer is also talking to SpaceSaver Parking Co. of Chicago, whose German parent company operates 100 or so garages in other countries, and Westfalia USA Inc. of York, Pa., also an affiliate of a German company, with about a dozen systems worldwide.

Automated parking systems can accommodate a handful of cars in a small condo building — or hundreds of cars in a multifloor office tower. The steel parking systems can be built above or below ground, in concrete boxes or in buildings tailored to look like the neighborhood.

The Hoboken garage houses about 320 cars and looks from the outside like an apartment building. ”I’ve been standing in front and had people say, ‘Are there any apartments available in that building?’ ” said Parking Solutions’ Kavanagh.

Automation extends to billing and calling for a car in advance. Robotic’s system keeps track of how long a car is parked. Depending on the configuration, residents can call for their cars by swiping a card on a reader or using a personal identification number from a phone on their way out the door.

”You can leave the keys, because there’s no one in the garage,” said Kavanagh.

Automated parking isn’t designed to increase traffic — zoning and parking rules usually limit the number of spaces a building can have. Rather, it’s about using less space. Manufacturers say automated systems at least double the capacity of a normal concrete parking garage, which requires entrance and exit ramps. Cars can be packed in close together because the doors don’t open until a car is delivered to its driver at the exit bay.

The biggest factor driving acceptance of automated parking is the value of land, manufacturers say. ”Property is so dear, the only way to provide parking is to reduce the space,” said Ken Livingston, general manager of SpaceSaver.

Robotic executives say a system for a 400-car garage costs between $12,000 and $16,000 a space. Condensing the parking area to reduce the land needed for a development from 2 acres to 1, or excavating 40 feet instead of 90 feet deep, can save a developer millions of dollars.

Even though it has long had high land costs, Boston has been resistant to automated parking. ”It’s a new technology,” said Kavanagh, who is also president of William A. Berry & Son Inc., a construction management firm. ”Everybody wants to be first — but nobody wants to be the first.”

Developers want to see any new system running smoothly in other locations before they invest. ”They want a comfort level, to put away any fears about operations,” Kavanagh said.

City of Boston officials seem receptive.

”For downtown, where the footprints are small, this is a good technology,” said Vineet Gupta, director of planning at the Boston Transportation Department, who said the city has begun encouraging developers to consider automated parking. ”We’ve said, ‘Have you explored this?’ “

It probably won’t hurt Robotic that David Passafaro, a friend and former chief of staff of Mayor Thomas M. Menino, is vice president and director of business development for Kavanagh’s Berry company. Passafaro narrates a promotional video for Parking Solutions, extolling the virtues of the system that works ”almost like magic.”

”It is among the coolest things you’ll ever see,” said the enthusiastic Passafaro. ”It’s safe, it’s clean, it’s environmentally sound.”

For car owners who treat their rides like pets, the idea may bring some concerns: Will my Mercedes convertible be parked under some leaky clunker of a pickup truck?

Robotic executives say the pallets that carry cars are solid steel and have deep grooves for the wheels that are also designed to hold about 70 gallons of liquid — enough capacity for a serious oil or antifreeze leak, and for snow, ice, and mud from the highway.

The pallets are regularly — and automatically — vacuumed or washed down.

But manufacturers acknowledge that automated systems are not without their glitches.

The New York Times reported in October — ”When will the killer robot garage strike again?” — that the $12 million Hoboken facility had sent a Jeep Wrangler and a Cadillac DeVille crashing to destruction. In addition, the city, which owns the Robotic-operated garage, has paid claims to owners of 40 cars for minor damage, the newspaper said.

Larry Byrnes, a spokesman for Robotic and a member of its board of directors, said in a letter to the editor of the newspaper that ”people and local politics” had been factors in the problems. Last week he suggested the city was at fault, saying it was ”unrealistic to expect the Hoboken Parking Utility to provide operators with the skill level needed to properly supervise this cutting-edge technology.” But John Corea, director of the Hoboken agency, disagreed. ”The problem with the garage is a lack of proper maintenance from Robotics,” he said.

Those and less serious problems — like the infrequent case of someone whose car may not be available in time to get to the airport for a plane to London — are covered by the operators, the companies say.

”We just afford them taxi cab fare,” said SpaceSaver’s Livingston. ”You’re car’s available by the time you get back.”

Thomas C. Palmer Jr. can be reached at tpalmer@globe.com.