Parking garage and low-clearance towing in Dallas.

Garage entrances in downtown Dallas, at the hospitals along Harry Hines, and under apartment buildings in Uptown and Oak Cliff post a height. That single number tells dispatch whether a flatbed can tilt its bed inside or whether a smaller wheel-lift truck has to go in and bring the car to the street. If you cannot see the sign, look at the entrance you actually drove through. The exit is sometimes taller than the way in, or the other way around. A guess of 'it felt low' is not as useful as the figure painted on the beam.

A flatbed is the right truck for all-wheel drive, a low sports car, or a car with a ruined wheel, and it is the wrong truck if the deck cannot get under the concrete. The workaround is often a wheel-lift or a dolly that can reach the stall, then a transfer if the car still needs to ride on a bed for the trip. Tight turns, a car boxed against a wall, and a stall on a slope all change the plan. Say which level you are on and whether the car can roll. A dead car on the roof of a garage and a dead car on the ground floor are different jobs even when the clearance is the same.

The calls cluster in a few places: office and hotel garages downtown and in the Arts District, hospital garages, apartment decks where a resident's car will not start on a Sunday night, and the occasional car that followed a GPS into a freight or service entrance it should not have. Surface lots at NorthPark, or a store lot in Duncanville, are ordinary tows. The garage is the special case, and it is worth naming as a garage on the first sentence of the call. If the car is in a private garage at a house, say whether the door is open and how much driveway is in front of it. A residential garage is usually a clearance problem and a space problem together.

Some cars in garages are not stuck because of height. The steering is locked, the parking brake is on and the release is dead, or the car is against a column with no angle to pull. Those are recovery details, and they belong on the first call. We are based at 1241 Willow Glen Dr in south Dallas. A garage in Oak Cliff or downtown is a reasonable run. A garage in Plano is a longer one, and the clearance question does not change with the distance. Give the posted height, the level, and the make of the car. That is enough to pick a truck instead of sending one that has to turn around at the bar.