I decided this morning to park the Beetle on the sixth level of the parking garage at the subway station.<\/p>\n
I had parked on the fourth level. Recently I changed to the fifth — I could park closer to the stairwell on the fifth, thus cutting down on walking time, even though it was another flight of stairs.<\/p>\n
But the sixth!<\/p>\n
If you’re driving out I-795, Baltimore’s Northwest Expressway, near exit four you can’t help<\/i> but notice the massive brick parking garage. Eight storeys tall, the tallest building in the area (until the Metro Centre<\/a> is built, anyway).<\/p>\n What intrigued me about the sixth floor was this. From the subway platform, it looks like there’s no retaining wall of any kind on the sixth floor deck. Oh, there’s a decorative green grille, but it doesn’t look like, from the ground, that it would be sturdy enough to stop a vehicle from plowing through and then plunging eighty feet to the ground.<\/p>\n Naturally, I had to investigate this. Also, I reasoned, I would be able to park even closer<\/i> to the parking garage stairwell, as the fifth level of the garage is fairly well abandoned so I couldn’t imagine that there would be many people parking on the sixth floor at all<\/i>.<\/p>\n I was, in fact, able to park immediately next to the stairwell on the sixth floor.<\/p>\n I was also able to investigate the apparent lack of restraint at the edge of the parking deck to my satisfaction.<\/p>\n High tensile metal ropes. Running in parallel, about four inches apart, from a foot off the concrete deck to about three feet up. They run the length of the deck, through the concrete and brick supports.<\/p>\n From the subway platform, they’re invisible behind the decorative green metal grille. It occurred to me that someone who was very<\/i> determined might be able to dislodge one or two, but they wouldn’t be able to dislodge them all<\/i> and thus plunge off the side. And even then, the metal grille would provide a last line of defense from a death by car plunge.<\/p>\n My curiosity sated, I went downstairs and hopped the train into the city.<\/p>\n The nice thing about where I parked was that, from the subway platform, I could see the blue Beetle. No retaining wall made it very easy to spot.<\/p>\n Otherwise, it was an uneventful day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I decided this morning to park the Beetle on the sixth level of the parking garage at the subway station. I had parked on the fourth level. Recently I changed to the fifth — I could park closer to the stairwell on the fifth, thus cutting down on walking time, even though it was anotherContinue reading “On Curiosity About Parking Garages”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[424,577],"class_list":["post-5326","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","tag-baltimore","tag-subway","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5326","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5326"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5326\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}