Most of us own a car, yet the majority of ordinary office employees do not commute to work by car. The reasons are the costs and the physical lack of parking spaces, which becomes an increasingly pressing issue the closer to the city centre we work – data collected by the Polish consulting firm BNM – Real Estate Advisory suggests.

Anyone who has tried to find an available parking space in a major city’s office district knows that in such places it is often simply impossible to park. This applies not only to visitors but also to employees. Although 95% of office developments offer the possibility of renting parking spaces, they are usually in short supply and subject to allocation – BNM data suggests.

his is because when renting office space, we most often cannot rent as many parking spaces as we would like. The decisive factor here is the so-called parking space ratio, which is based on the ratio of the number of parking spaces to the leased area. It shows how many square metres of office space a company must rent to be entitled to rent one parking space.

In approximately one in ten office buildings, this ratio is very favourable, i.e. higher than 1:30. This means that with a 1,000 sq m office, which can accommodate approximately 100 employees on average, a company can rent at least 33 parking spaces. However, there are also addresses where the right to rent one parking space is obtained only after renting 200 sq m of office space. In that case, with a 1,000 sq m headquarters, we can rent no more than 5 parking spaces. In prime locations in the largest cities, the parking space ratio can be even less favourable.

One parking space for several workstations

As a result, although on the major office markets it is necessary on average to lease around 75 sq m of office space in order to be able to rent one parking space, in practice the situation varies significantly between individual office developments. There are buildings where it is easy to find a parking space even for everyone who wants one. Such conditions are more common in buildings located further from the city centre or even on the outskirts, where access is less convenient and land is significantly cheaper. On the other hand, in the very city centre, a company may have literally just a few parking spaces for 100 employees. In such cases, parking spaces become a particularly scarce commodity – available at most to senior management, directors, or the most important guests and business partners.

There is a shortage of parking spaces at office buildings

BNM data shows that, statistically, office buildings in Warsaw and Poznań have the greatest shortage of parking spaces. The scale of this phenomenon can be clearly illustrated by calculating the number of workstations per parking space. Assuming that each employee has, on average, around 10 square metres of office space, it is easy to calculate that in Poznań and Warsaw there are 8–9 workstations per parking space. The situation is better in Gdańsk and Kraków, where one parking space is available for every 6–7 employees.

It is clearly more expensive in the garage.

The right to rent a parking space is one thing. Once an office tenant has this option, they also have to pay for the parking space itself. Renting a parking space in an underground garage costs on average from around PLN 300 in Łódź, Gdańsk or Poznań, to around PLN 450 per month in Warsaw. However, these are average rates. This means that even in Warsaw, there are office developments where the cost of renting a parking space in an underground garage does not exceed PLN 200 per month. On the other hand, there are also addresses where a parking space under the building can cost even more than PLN 1,000 per month.

Surface parking spaces are cheaper, usually by several dozen percent. Average rates for parking “under the open sky” range from just under PLN 200 per month in Łódź to slightly over PLN 300 in Warsaw.

Those who seek shall find

If an employee whose employer has not provided them with a space in an underground garage is determined to commute to work by car, they have plenty of options to choose from. One option is to look through the offers of commercial car parks, where monthly subscriptions are available. Another option is the private market, where you can look for a parking space in the garage of a residential building next to the office building or use mobile apps through which people make their parking spaces available to one another during working hours. In both cases, you should expect a cost of several hundred zlotys per month.

This is still a better solution than parking in publicly available spaces – especially if we work within a paid parking zone for which we do not have a subscription and do not have the preferences available to local residents or taxpayers. When paying at a parking meter for 8 hours of parking, we may be required to spend several dozen zlotys on this every day. On a monthly basis, this can therefore result in a cost that often exceeds PLN 1,000.

Pro tip: parishes, hotels and shopping centres also sometimes offer parking spaces for a fee.

Estimated cost of parking in a municipal paid parking zone (without a subscription)

It is therefore hardly surprising that, faced with such costs, some people switch to public transport, where a monthly pass can cost as much as just a few days of parking in a paid parking zone during working hours. Moreover, in an increasing number of large cities, holders of public transport season tickets can use P+R (park and ride) car parks free of charge. They are usually located outside the city centre, in places where, after parking the car, it is easy to switch to a bus, tram or metro, which allows us to quickly get to work or to a business meeting.

Public transport makes life easier in large cities

As a result, although the majority of Polish families have a car, commuting by car to the centre of a large city is an option chosen by only a smaller proportion of office workers. Data from Statistics Poland confirms that public transport is a particularly popular solution in the largest cities. In cities with a population of more than 500,000, over 90% of households use public transport. For clarity, the cities mentioned above, with populations of more than half a million, are: Warsaw, Wrocław, Kraków, Poznań and Łódź. The use of public transport in these cities is mainly driven by necessity, due to limited parking availability and the high cost of parking in city centres.

Jerzy Węglarz

Analyst, BNM – Real Estate Advisory