APCOA wants to make parking garages urban turntables

Stuttgart. From charging stations and package boxes to snack stands to drone starts: Parkriese APCOA is driving the restructuring of its business model with new plans for its locations throughout Europe.

The company would like to move away from the pure parking lot for vehicles and gradually transform them into "urban turntables"-turnstile for mobility and other services for drivers, but also for logistics companies, as APCOA manager Frank van der Sant said. In addition, it is expected that the number of locations will increase significantly faster than before - by 2030 by an average of 1,000 per year.

Europe's largest parking garage operator

APCOA currently manages around 11,500 parking garages and parking spaces in 13 different countries and is therefore Europe's largest parking garage operator. In 2019, the company, based at Stuttgart Airport, generated sales of more than one billion euros. APCOA operates 300 own locations in Germany and more than 1000 that are managed on behalf of private owners.

van der Sant has a kind of "shop-in-shop" concept based on large department stores. Small providers should be able to rent the parking spaces either permanently or for certain shorter periods in order to offer their products or services. From Van der Sant's perspective, both sides benefit from this. "We gain more occupancy, you can use the room flexibly," he said.

Parking garages are never fully used

One of the general difficulties in the shop with parking garages is that most of them are frequented very differently. They are often overcrowded at peak times, but many places remain empty, especially at night or early in the morning. "Unfortunately, our parking garages are never fully busy, except maybe on a few Saturdays before Christmas," said van der Sant.

Parking garages have been discussed for a long time, especially as a central and inexpensive transshipment point for logistics companies, and corresponding offers are already available in many cities. In Stuttgart, APCOA tested the 2019 concept together with the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering in a large pilot project. Traffic experts see a good way to keep the delivery traffic with trucks and delivery vans out of the already overloaded inner cities.

Idea: Coverage for logistics companies

The pilot project mainly dealt with the reloading of smaller shipments of vans on cargo bikes of a local provider. In the meantime, however, they are already working with all major parcel service providers, said van der Sant.

Now the next steps should follow gradually-depending on what is asked where and can be implemented. There is a lot planned, and some of it is already available: from the battery charging service to rental cars, bicycles and scooters to package picking stations, rental storage rooms and car washes as well as start and landing areas for freight drones and air taxis- if the latter are available at some point.

planned additional offers

There is also talk of pick-up stations for food from the fast food restaurant. "It is not that we know exactly what we want to do where," said van der Sant. It doesn't have to be everything in all places. Depending on the country, the need is very different.

APCOA claims to lease and operate the parking garages and parking spaces, but does not buy or build it itself. That is less capital-intensive, said van der Sant. They only want to make a few themselves of the planned additional offers in the "hubs"-such as the rental boxes known as self-storage. "We are considering doing business ourselves," said van der Sant. It also depends on the national regulations. In Scandinavia, for example, APCOA builds its own charging stations and sells the electricity. Approval is required in Germany. "We don't strive for that."