A Strip of Waste Ground Between the Tram and the Railway in Modřany Is Now 52 Parking Spaces

Prague's Technical Road Administration has finished work on a plot in Modřany that had been sitting unused between the tram line and the railway, and it is now a park-and-ride with 52 spaces. Zdopravy.cz reports that the intention is to make transferring to public transport easier and to take some traffic out of the wider centre.

The interesting thing about the scheme is how little of it is construction. According to TSK the site went through a general revitalisation rather than a build: self-seeded vegetation was cleared off, and the part of the asphalt surface that tree roots had pushed up and broken was repaired. Signage was added on the approach roads so that drivers can find it. What has changed is the status of the land, not its substance — a fenced-off remnant between two rail corridors has been given a use it can be counted in.

Three of the 52 bays are reserved for vehicles carrying people with disabilities. The car park has been brought into the citywide P+R system under the free-parking regime, with a maximum stay of twelve hours — long enough for a working day and a commute either side of it, short enough that the spaces are not simply absorbed by residents.

Jaromír Beránek, the deputy mayor for transport, framed it as a site finally doing something.

In Modřany we have managed to make sensible use of a neglected space between the train and the tram and turn it into a functioning interchange.

— Jaromír Beránek, deputy mayor of Prague for transport

Fifty-two spaces is a small number

It is worth being clear about scale, because the announcement is not. Fifty-two cars is a fraction of what any single arterial road carries into Prague in a morning, and a park-and-ride of this size will not, on its own, be visible in the traffic figures for the centre that the release invokes.

What it is instead is cheap. The site required no land purchase, no structure and, on TSK's own account, little more than clearance and patching. That is the argument for doing more of them: the places where a car can be taken off the road one stop before the congestion starts tend to be exactly these awkward leftovers beside railway lines, too small and too oddly shaped to interest anyone building anything. A city that finds a hundred of them has found a real park-and-ride policy. A city that finds one has a tidier corner of Modřany.

The location does the work here. The plot sits where the tram line and the railway run alongside each other, which is what lets a driver arriving from the south leave the car and continue on either. The number of people who will do that is small. The number of sites in Prague where the same trick is available is not obviously small at all, and this one cost a clearance contract to prove it.