If you’ve been wondering what will happen to your car when it enters the mysterious interior of West Hollywood’s new robo garage, this video explains it all. Construction on this $18 million project will begin in March and the garage will occupy the parking lot behind City Hall at 8300 Santa Monica Blvd. at Sweetzer. The robo garage includes 200 parking spaces and will match the height of the three-story City Hall next to it with a 25-foot wide community plaza between the two buildings. This represents a net increase of 132 spaces.
As the video shows, parking in the robo garage won’t be much different from leaving your car with a valet. Except you won’t be expected to offer a tip, and there’s the innovative process of a machine picking it up, moving it across a parking structure and placing it neatly in an open spot.
Here’s a breakdown of the entire process:
1. You drive up to City Hall and park your car in one of 4 “garage” spots.
2. You get out and grab a ticket while Robo Garage loads your car onto the shuttle.
3. Now in the hands of Robo Garage, your car is whisked off on the shuttle through the parking structure. Once an open spot is found, your beauty is loaded into the spot.
4. Once it’s time to leave, you return to the garage and input your ticket to retrieve your car (you can even call/text ahead to expedite the process). Robo Garage tells you which bay door your car will be delivered.
5. Robo Garage then powers up the shuttle and retrieves your car, placing it in the corresponding garage spot.
6. Robo Garage notifies you your car has arrived. You get in and drive off happily, knowing your city spent good money on an innovative parking machine. Bye Robo Garage!
Be sure to check out the video, as it’s a pretty cool process that’s sure to get you techies excited. The garage is designed by LPA Inc. You can find more information about it on the city’s website.
and what happens during a power failure?
There is usually a generator to override any power failure.
The first time I went to Seoul, Korea in 1996 was a tremendous learning experience. The streets downtown were not concrete.. they were paved with big pebble tiles and some had marble sidewalks… The buildings were so modern and then we entered a parking garage. It was a robo-garage. In the center of Seoul is a big hill that houses the American military base. Our influence is quite astounding. Seoul is quite fantastic and robo-garages are all over the city. While this concept seems foreign to the USA these efficiencies are being employed throughout the far east. In 2001 Incheon… Read more »
That’s pretty close to the per-space cost of a regular garage. Parking structures are insanely expensive, especially compared to the revenue that you lose by taking away space that could have been used for offices, stores, residences, etc.
Any way you slice it, parking structures are a huge resource-drain, with or without the robots.
TimF, let’s assume for the sake of argument hat the cost IS $13,000 per space. Now, amortize that over a given number of uses, per unit and per year…it becomes a clever and practical solution to an ongoing problem. If the power goes out, there’s a manual override.
you say $18 million. I assume that is for the entire project. the youtube video says $2.6 million. but even that, for 200 parking spaces, is $13,000 per space. Then how much is it to maintain the robots? Is this really cost effective?