Now that Elon Musk has bought Twitter - now the Pit edition (Part 2)

The thing that has been oft commented on, in the UK at least, is that multistorey car parks (multistory in US English?) just won’t be able to cope with the additional weight.

(Aside: I was quite pleased with this. Those car parks have tiny spaces in them. The obvious way to make multistorey car parks safe for EVs is to reduce capacity, = bigger parking spaces.)

j

Sounds like a job for Kramer:

Funny I had almost included a comment about car parks.

But yes, if at some point in the future most vehicles are EVs and most are WAG 25% heavier than cars were when the facility was designed, something is going to give.


There was a building collapse in New York City a couple years ago. Apparently it’s common to repurpose old 3- or 4-story factory / warehouse buildings as car storage facilities. Where you drop your car off at the ground and the staff somehow gets it upstairs. Turns out these are sometimes bootleg conversions, woefully under-engineered, and cars are wedged in there at great density. So eventually something is gonna give.

See

and

In US English, that’s “multistory parking garages”. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

To someone from the US, a car park sounds like a place where you can take your car on the weekend to play with other cars.

I stand corrected! ( :wink:)

j

Not necessarily.

“Car park”, “parking structure”, and “parking ramp” are all regional terms for multistory (never an embedded “e”) parking facilities.

If any American thinks there’s only one universal term, they simply haven’t traveled very much around their (admittedly vast) home country.

But “parking garage” is used nationally, that’s why in the articles above, the BBC called it a car park but NBC called it a parking garage.

(There may though be some regional variation in the US that calls it a “car park”, but it would be odd to hear outside that region.)

Discussed in this thread at the time:
Parking garage collapse in Lower Manhattan [2023-04-18] - Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share - Straight Dope Message Board

I’ve never heard “car park” used in the US.

But I did love the image of people’s cars all going to the park on Saturday to play with the other cars.

I have lived in the Great Plains/Lower Midwest, Southeast, Mid Atlantic, New York City and New England and have traveled extensively on business to several places each in Texas, California, Colorado and Washington (and I mean spending 4 days a week, months on end in each place). Never have I heard “Car Park” to refer to a parking garage or a parking lot.

I’ve heard it used by a co-worker in the US…who happened to be a British ex-pat

I have never watched “Gods of Egypt”, but I did read a movie review on how it was the worst movie ever, by Becky Chambers, which introduced me to her writing and, for that, I will give “God’s of Egypt” a small nod.

I did as well. My follow-up thought was that that image is the most American thing ever.

I remember the episode of Happy Days when the Fonz and Pinky Toscadero took their cars to the car park to play…

And having a picnic with jam sandwiches.

For what it’s worth, in German, it’s not a garage, it’s a “house.”

Parken + Haus = Parkhaus. Parking house.

Yeah, but that’s because they can’t stand the French, or they’re not direct enough to refer to it as a REAL American, like Moe Szyslak*.

*That’s gotta be the hardest name in the Simpsons for me to spell, had to look it up.

Germans like to stick -haus on many things…Rathaus…Bauhaus…Mehrfamilienwohnhaus…

My favorite has always been Krankenhaus - sickness house. AKA a hospital. Completely logical but somehow so wrong at the same time.

Just as logical-but-wrong as leaving the fire alarm out of the fire station.