Owners have been unhappy about this state of affairs for decades and they have finally come up with an answer which is being trialled here. The project is called Park_Up.
Turning residential and office parking facilities into local logistical hubs is a great way of ensuring that valuable space in city centres gets used properly.
Parking company Apcoa has teamed up with the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering (IAO) to show that publicly accessible parking spaces can be flexibly used and financed for logistics purposes.
The aim is to revolutionise what experts calls the "last mile," namely the local delivery of wares and services that have arrived from afar.
What makes the project special and particularly green is that the car parks are used at night and in the early morning to house delivery pushbikes.
Trucks drop off the goods at the multi-storeys, leaving the zero-emissions bikes to bring things to customers. During the day, the car parks revert to storing cars.
"The aim of the Park_Up project is to make optimum use of additional capacities within multi-storey car parks for logistics purposes," says Steffen Bilger, parliamentary state secretary in the Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure.
"This benefits everyone. Parcel handling on cargo bikes is potentially very interesting from a business perspective, as well as being low in emissions and making a sustainable contribution to the supply chain of the future."
Projects like this usually fail at the outset since space in inner cities is rare and expensive.
"For logistics companies, renting space in the centre of cities is not viable," says IAO project head Bernd Bienzeisler - especially since the areas are used for only a few hours a day.
The three Apcoa multi-storey car parks here have areas zoned off-limits for cars. Container shipments arrive at the parking bays on larger vehicles in the early morning. The goods are transferred to the pushbike delivery vehicles and delivered within a radius of a few hundred metres. Once the deliveries are completed, the parking bays can be used by motorists.
Logistics expert Michael Muenter sees the project as a move towards solving Stuttgart's chronic traffic problems.
"We are not talking here about large amounts but we need to just try it out and not just talk about it," says Muenter.
A similar project in Berlin consisted of setting up a micro-depot to handle containers and involved major German delivery companies DHL, DPD and the US company UPS.
A 12-month test using cargo bikes showed that the scheme was viable in densely populated areas and the depot in the city's harbour area will remain open.
Trials in other German cities are producing similarly encouraging results, and more and more city planners are realizing that car parks are far too valuable to be used for just parking or washing motor cars. The next level is to deliver a shopper's purchases to his or her parked car. The Daimler start-up platform Lab1886 has been trying this out since mid-June.
The Stuttgart car park initiative is backed by €1.7 million (RM7.9mil) from the Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure’s Modernity Fund programme.
A key financial aspect is that cargo bike firms involved in Stuttgart, like Velocarrier, can use as many bays as they need. Pricing can be flexible, depending on demand, air pollution levels and prevailing weather conditions. Ideally, the data matrix could be used to control delivery flow. Many car parks already use similar dynamic management systems.
Apcoa chief Philippe Op de Beeck is convinced that Park_Up is ready to be rolled out in many other cities. With 200,000 parking bays in 80 cities, the company is not short of space.
But the concept will only work if other car park users cooperate, says Bienzeisler. It is hard to physically block off parking spaces designated for delivery transfers. The idea is to install displays to show whether bays are free or in use by Velocarrier.
It seems motorists may well have to get used to their multi-storeys morphing into mobility hubs.
