Transfer Bay - Parkonomics

A transfer bay is the loading position of an automated parking system where drivers leave and retrieve vehicles, and the machine takes over. In a parking facility:

The transfer bay is the hand-off point in an automated garage: the driver pulls in, gets out, and leaves the car on a pallet, and from there the machine takes over, carrying it into the storage rack. How many bays you build sets how fast people can drop off and pick up at the peak. Illustrative.

Transfer bays are sized to the peak retrieval queue, not the average; an undersized bay makes the whole machine feel broken.

Considerations

Bay counts, cycle times, and queue space drive the user experience more than the storage technology behind them. The transfer bay is the APS’s front door and its bottleneck.