Meet the parking garage perfectly suited for an episode of The Jetsons.
Below the UCLA Santa Monica Outpatient Surgery Center, the machines in a new automated garage do all of the work for you, but watch out: software glitches could hold your car hostage.
After opening the $8-million garage to the surgery center's employees and to the public in the spring of last year, developers say they are still debugging new control software for two robotic arms that grab, store and return vehicles to docking bays without human assistance.
The two 8,000-pound cranes, which share a fairly tight aisle, do not always communicate properly when there are as many as six cars that need to be parked simultaneously, and that's causing delays.
"That's complicated... to not crash into each other. One crane should move out of the way," said Randy Miller, president of Nautilus Group, which built the garage. "We're refining the logic."
Miller said his is the first robotic garage operating the West Coast.
"There's a price to pay for being the first," he said.
In Los Angeles, others are planned at West Hollywood City Hall and at an affordable housing project in Chinatown. Miller said he intends to build more in Santa Monica, including at a proposed mixed-use housing and commercial project at Sixth Street and Colorado Avenue.
The Santa Monica garage located directly across from the UCLA hospital on 16th Street might not be operating to its full potential yet—but there are still benefits.
When the equipment is working properly, a car can be retrieved in less than two minutes. Plus, there is virtually no threat of thefts, and you will never roam the garage in a panic, frantically clicking your key-less entry remote when you've forgotten where exactly you parked.
"It breaks down sometimes, but when it's working it's really great," said Laurin Eimers, a registered nurse who works at the outpatient center. She said her car has been held up a few times by the technical malfunctions.
Here's how the garage works: a driver pulls in to one of the six bays and exits his car. After he checks in at a kiosk, a movable platform takes the car from the entry bay to a crane, which lowers it head-first into one of 250 parking slots on six vertically-stacked levels.
The center's employees like Eimers who pay monthly rates to park, swipe their drivers' licenses to identify their cars. The public uses debit or credit cards. When the driver returns to retrieve her car, she swipes the same card, and the crane picks it up, spins it 180 degrees and places it back in the entry bay.
"It's going to take quite a while to get people acclimated to working with this type of system," said Nautilus' garage operation manager Shaun Harris.
Harris' job is to figure out how to make the system more user-friendly before it fully opens to the public in the next four to six months.
"It's supposed to be completely autonomous," he said. But "when they come in, people don't have any idea what they're looking at."
Currently, valets (human ones) assist drivers.
"We want it to be like an elevator," Miller said. "Every once in a while it will break down, but no one is ever concerned about when they get in."
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"Employee Parking?" I thought they were going to ride the Expo line?. Of course not one person going in to UCLA for surgery will be using parking. That is a big stretch. Drive up to UCLA park your car for more than your IRA is worth, have a little surgery then jump back into your car. We are not fools. What are the parking rates for this wonderful robotic garage?.
Which brings me to the point which I always ponder sitting in a doctor's office for one hour. Are doctors really busy, or are they really just fleecing you for parking fees?.
The fairview branch of the public library is santa monica parking in it's Zenith. Free parking for library employees, parking meters for people who want to visit the library.
Parking costs money to build and provide. It is never free, and if you park and aren't paying for it, someone else is. That someone else is usually diffused to all tax payers or customers of a place of business, regardless of whether they use a car or need parking provided. I prefer when parking is charged, it is more fair, and when parking is priced appropriately, it discourages over loading, and in fact makes it easier to find a space. The parking meter was invented so people could find a space and improve turn over for places of business. As for free parking for employees, this is typical in many private businesses and public services and amounts to being an employee benefit. But when such parking privilege is provided as a benefit, commuters who don't park should also have a parking cash out option for the value of not taking up a space, as I do at my employer in Santa Monica.
First they were free, then they were metered, then it was two hours free, now they are 90 minutes free, the problem with that is it takes 30 minutes to find an empty space. The wonderful thing about parking is you pay for dead time queuing to pay. Sears is famous for that 2 hrs. free parking, but 30 minutes of that time will be spent in line in the store. I have two friends who live in S. Orange County one in Aliso Viejo, one in Laguna Niguel. No parking meters, 8 percent tax rate, no pot holes??? A great site I just found is "Zip2tax' Just what do we get for 9.5 percent tax rate??? Bike lanes that one person a day rides on Ocean Park Blvd. Because I live on O.P. Blvd. and have to drive it to get from A to B I have taken an interest on the number of bikes using their wonderful lane. The number is zero to one. Never more than one person. I know, I am just not getting the history of "' build it and they will use it". I am looking forward to the Expo Line and the efect it will have on O.P. Blvd. Can't wait to report on the results.
I keep telling people that i love this city, but believe me it gets harder and harder.
Last time I checked the people walking in front of my home were not blowing in particulate pollution from brake pads or hastening the destruction of the infrastructure with their body weight. To compare the two is beyond ridiculous. I welcome more people, not more cars. Free parking is not a community benefit, it is a driver benefit. But it is also a driver inconvenience, because under valuing parking is precisely what why spaces are hard to find where demand is high. It's economics 101, but we prefer soviet style management of cars over market forces in America. For regulating overflow on residential streets, overnight parking permitting is one of the best ways to address that issue, and has been found to be more effective than parking minimum zoning mandates. If an area is permitted and still getting overflow, it is either an issue of poor enforcement or it is too easy to acquire the permits.
All transport is subsidized, but there are several distinct differences between the way we subsidize driving, & subsidize transit. First off, nearly everyone complains there is too much traffic, if there is too much of something, why are we encouraging more of it? Cars become less useful the more people use them. The inverse is true for transit, where more ridership supports more buses, reducing wait times & making transit more convenient & timely. Take the million people riding transit in LA everyday & put them in cars adding to existing traffic & you would quickly realize how important transit is to allowing cars to have any usefulness left at all. Where transit is provided, it is accessible to all, even if not everyone does use it, but the same is not true of driving which is inherently exclusive to some. Driving is also double subsidized. Roadways are subsidized & storage of vehicles is subsidized. The land devoted to storing cars around Santa Monica is clearly visible from space, consuming significant portions of the city, most of it charged for use below market & often "free". Bus riders do not require lots of land to store private property at their destination, & the BBB bus yard, for a system that carries about 80K riders a day, is about the size of just 1 beach parking lot. Cars are inherently inefficient users of space, & I don't think it is unreasonable for drivers to pay a greater share for that privileged allocation of our limited land.