Waterside Place 1B, a 312-unit residential tower scheduled to break ground next March in Boston’s Seaport District, will contain just 84 stacked parking spaces on the second story.

With the cost to build each and every underground parking space in Boston topping $100,000, developers have strong incentives to adopt new technologies maximizing garage space.

New condominium and apartment projects are using semi-automated lifts that elevate vehicles and enable another row to be parked underneath, nearly doubling the garage capacity. Two boutique condo projects are installing robotic parking systems that shuffle cars on pallets, no drivers or attendants required.

“The big idea is primarily to densify the parking: providing as many parking spaces in the least square-footage that you can,” said Art Stadig, vice president for Walker Parking Consultants in Boston. “It’s most cases, it’s just a constraint of what the urban environment has to give for the project.”

The Boulevard, a 52-unit condo tower under construction at 110 Broad St., is using one of Boston’s first fully-automated parking systems.

Manufactured by ParkPlus Inc., it will store 48 vehicles on four underground levels. Residents will park in a loading bay, get out of their vehicle and enter personal information in a kiosk. An elevator lowers the vehicle into storage bays where cars are rearranged in a Tetris-like fashion.

“It enables you to maximize the below-grade parking and provides a completely hands-off user experience,” said Robert Law, a designer at Finegold Alexander Architects in Boston. “That’s the beauty of this system.”

The system even scans the vehicle to ensure that no passengers or pets have been left inside. Residents later summon their vehicle to the surface using a smartphone app.

Fully automated systems cost from $15,000 to $50,000 per space, depending upon the specifications and economies of scale, Stadig said.

Multifamily Projects Embrace Automation

A majority of multifamily developers in downtown Boston and the Seaport are considering some form of automated parking, said David Nagahiro, a principal with CBT Architects in Boston.

In Fort Point, developer JB Ventures plans 10 automated parking spaces for its 9-unit condo building called 10 Farnsworth, now under construction.

The site – a former parking lot measuring just under 5,000 square feet – challenged architects to find a way to include parking, a lobby and a nearly 3,000-square-foot ground-floor storefront, Nagahiro said.

“It enabled the developer to have more retail on the ground floor and a more effective way of parking cars,” he said.

Mechanical equipment lifts and moves cars on pallets into storage positions. The technology is the same used by Amazon and other companies to optimize the efficiency of their warehouse space.

“You drive into a garage, step out, the gate goes down and the car goes into a position,” Nagahiro said. “The robotics are smart and they learn your patterns.”

Without the need for elevator operators or valet attendants, automated systems cut labor costs and overcome drivers’ reluctance to hand over the keys to a stranger, Nagahiro said.

Stacking systems are in place at Gerding Edlen’s brand-new Eddy apartment tower in East Boston, and set to be used at the 312-unit Waterside Place phase 1B apartment tower on Congress Street in the Seaport.

Waterside Place developer John Drew said he’s leaning toward a stacking system manufactured by Denver-based Harding Steel after testing its operation during a visit to The Eddy.

“It’s very simple, and simple is good,” Drew said. “We looked at it for ease of operation and safety as well. Is it something that everybody would be comfortable with as a resident?”

Set to break ground in March, Waterside Place’s second apartment tower will include 84 stacked parking spaces on-site, all on the second level. Additional future parking could be provided by a proposed Massport transportation center next door.

Automated parking also is planned in a proposed 285-foot-tall residential tower on the James Hook & Co. lobster pound site on Northern Avenue. The half-acre site is surrounded by roads on three sides and Fort Point Channel on the fourth.

Preliminary plans by Elkus Manfredi Architects would include two automobile elevators to accommodate two floors of parking, each containing 30 spaces, architect David Manfredi said at a public presentation last year.

And the new developers of a 480,243-square-foot mixed-use proposal in the Seaport have redesigned their parking arrangements to embrace stacking, with significant potential savings.

The Arrowstreet-designed project would include a 293-room hotel and 304 apartments on the Boston Planning & Development Agency-owned parcel K at 315 Northern Ave.

In a redesigned proposal recently submitted to the BPDA, Arrowstreet reduced the underground parking garage from 640 spaces on three levels to 197 spaces on a single level. But by using stacking systems combined with valet attendants, the scaled-down garage could fit up to 420 vehicles, Arrowstreet Principal Amy Korte said.

Korte predicts that automated parking systems will evolve rapidly in the next five years as the use of autonomous vehicles and ride-sharing services expands.

“We’re looking not just at stackers, but the changes in how people are moving around cities,” she said. “We’re still at the very low levels of autonomy. But you could design something planning for longer queues and drop-offs within your site and allow that car to self-park.”