Santa Monica Medical Building first of kind to offer automated parking

Posted on | March 21, 2011 | No Comments

Excerpt from How Parking Impacts Your Medical Practice 

In general, parking structures are less appealing to patients, doctors and support staff. They can be confusing if they are poorly designed, making it hard for your patients to find elevators and remember the level where they parked. Lighting and cleanliness also is a greater concern with structured parking since they are, by their very nature, darker and closed in.
 
If you’re in a large building, you may have the option of an automated parking system, which moves cars around on pallets like a jukebox to stack and park them in an unmanned multi-story structure.

In Santa Monica, Calif., for example, the new Regents of the University of California medical office building, located directly across the street from the Santa Monica-UCLA Medical Center and Orthopedic Hospital, will offer an automated parking system – the first of its kind on the West Coast.

Designed by Michael W. Folonis Architects in Los Angeles and developed by Randall Miller, principal of Nautilus Group Inc., the three-story building will be able to fit twice as many cars into the subterranean garage as would be possible with conventional parking.

Automated parking systems are efficient, Weiss explains, taking an average of less than two minutes to retrieve a car, and the risk of cars being damaged in the process is virtually nonexistent since no human touches them and the cars themselves do not move – the pallets do.

Adapted from MedicalOfficeToday

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