When the UCLA Outpatient Surgery and Oncology Center in Santa Monica opens in January, cancer patients won’t be greeted by uniformed valets when they drive in to the facility’s underground garage.
Instead, drivers will pull into an unusual automated parking bay that will whisk away their car and bring it back to them later, using machinery comparable to what warehouses employ to shuffle pallets of canned corn or laundry detergent.
Randy Miller of Nautilus Group, the Santa Monica developer of the 50,000-square-foot outpatient center, said he worked with a warehouse automation company in Grand Rapids, Mich., to improve on existing automated parking technology. Mechanical parking systems are not seen often in Los Angeles.
“Drivers in New York and in Europe are used to automated parking structures, but it’s not very common on the West Coast,” said Miller, the firm’s principal. “We saw it as the best way to quickly and safely park as many cars as possible in a small space.”
The structure was built for about $8 million, but costs about one-third less per stall than a conventional garage in part because it uses less space.
The system works like this: After a driver swipes a credit card at the parking bay, the garage door opens and a small sled slides under the car, latching onto the vehicle’s tires. The sled brings the car into a six-level compartment of parking shelves. An elevator crane on a rail track moves the car into an open slot.
When someone is ready to depart, the system is designed to get the driver on the road in less than two minutes, compared with the typical six minutes at a conventional automated parking facility, according to Miller.
Customer charges are expected to be comparable with valet parking in Santa Monica. The automated system will accommodate 380 vehicles in a space that normally could only handle 200. As a result, the garage for the $29 million outpatient facility can be used for overflow parking from Santa Monica-UCLA Medical Center and Orthopaedic Hospital, which last month opened a 315-bed inpatient tower across the street.
