Three hundred and twenty four city residents will soon be able to turn over one of the more annoying aspects of their lives to a computer thanks to a soon-to-be-completed 324-space, fully automated parking facility that is being erected at 916 Garden St. Some residents oppose aspects of the garage’s design, but many have signed up for spots. Certain changes in the design are scheduled to be discussed at a Zoning Board hearing this Tuesday at 7 p.m. in City Hall. Residents who use the automated garage will not drive their cars up a series of ramps to a reserved parking space. Instead, their cars will be delivered to their parking spaces and returned to them by an elegant system of computer-operated elevators and trolleys. The garage is expected to open in 12 weeks, officials say. Fully-automated garages have been built in Italy and Germany, but the Hoboken structure “will be the first automated garage of its kind in the United States,” said Frank Belgiovine, whose Hackensack based construction company, the Belcor-Megan Group, is erecting the facility. By making use of the patented car-transporting technology, officials say they will be able to park 324 cars in a space that would hold less than 50 cars if it were built like a standard parking garage. In addition to moving cars from the ground floor to parking spaces throughout the seven-story structure, the computer operated transport system is designed to track the time of day drivers tend to use their cars, so that cars can be disbursed to their owners as efficiently as possible. “The computer in this facility is a thinking computer,” said Jim Caufield, an engineer who has worked on the project. “It will learn about what cars go in and out in the morning. It will cycle the parked cars to the front in the garage so that they will be in a good position to be picked up when the drivers need them.” Officials said the technology in the garage was so efficient that it would take an average of only two minutes to locate a driver’s car and bring it down to the ground floor. As for dropping it off, “It’s just like leaving your car in your garage,” said Belgiovine. There are a total of four staging areas at ground level that are similar in size and appearance to a single-car garage where a driver can drop off or pick up his car. To drop off the car, a driver would drive onto a steel palette in one of the four staging areas and walk out through the door he just drove through. Can’t leave your pooch Once the driver leaves his car, he would exit through the front door, initiating a laser detection system. The laser is looking for any movement at all. “Something as small as a mouse might get by this thing, but nothing else,” said Caufield. “This is to make sure that people don’t forget their dogs. Also it makes sure that nobody is worried about a sleeping child being left in their cars.” If the laser detects no movement, a rear door will open and the steel palette that the car sits on will be lifted onto a trolley, rotated 180 degrees so that the car will face the proper direction when the driver collects it again and transported at ground level to one of thirteen parking lanes. At that point, an elevator will carry the car to the appropriate floor where the palette it rests on will be lifted up and placed in its space. There are four spaces in each lane. Two sit on either side of the elevators. When a driver comes to collect his car, he will swipe an encoded card next to the entrance at the garage door, the computer will locate his car, and the process will begin again in reverse. “It seems very complex, but it is actually very simple,” said Belgiovine. Officials say that if the Hoboken garage is successful, automated garages are likely to be built in other parts of the U.S. soon. “We have had inquiries from Manhattan, Colorado and Washington, D.C.,” said Caufield. “I don’t think that you will see conventional garages built in urban areas again after this gets going.”