The total area of areas where you have to pay to park your car has increased by more than a third in recent years. This is evident from data that BNR requested from data company Spotzi† The increase appears to be the result of a so-called waterbed effect.
In total, the surface of all paid parking areas in the Netherlands is about the same size as the entire island of Ameland: 286 square kilometers. Compared to 2013, this is an increase in surface area of 33 percent. Large and medium-sized cities are leading the way with expansion, according to the data, but it is also increasingly impossible to park your car for free in tourist areas. The Zeeland coast is an example of this. In 2013, according to Spotzi, you could still park there for free for the most part, today that is no longer the case. The increase in paid parking zones is also due to a waterbed effect: if people have to park somewhere paid, they move to areas where you can still park for free. These fill up again, after which municipalities try to combat the crowds with paid parking.
Municipalities have therefore started to earn more from paid parking: Statistics Netherlands (CBS) calculated that the total revenue from parking fees last year amounted to €1.1 billion. That is €340 million more than in 2017, when CBS started the national count.
Data from the parking app Parkmobile shows that the increasing surface area of paid parking has not led to a large increase in average costs per hour. According to Parkmobile, that amount remained around €1.80 per hour. The exception to the rule is Amsterdam, where app users have started paying almost double (€3) since 2011. Parking permits are not cheap there either. The valet parking department also notices that the average parking time has become shorter: ten years ago people parked on the street for an average of two hours, now it is an average of one and a half hours. This decrease could of course also be because motorists are increasingly directed to parking garages. Almost every city reduces the number of parking spaces.
– Thanks for information from Autoweek.nl