CZK 1.62 Million a Parking Space: Prague Opens the Country's Dearest Park-and-Ride at Opatov

Prague opened a park-and-ride garage for 495 cars beside the Opatov station on metro C on Wednesday 7 October. It cost the city 663.8 million crowns excluding VAT, or 803 million with tax — which is 1.62 million crowns per parking space, and makes it, as Zdopravy.cz puts it, probably the most expensive P+R garage in the country.

The four-storey building stands on the east side of Chilská street, in the gap between the D1 motorway and the metro station. Ten spaces are reserved for disabled drivers and 43 for cars running on CNG or LPG; there is room inside for 32 bicycles. Twenty-four hours of parking costs 50 crowns, the same tariff as the other TSK-run P+R sites.

What the money did not buy yet

The rooftop park that is part of the design is not open. It is to be completed in a later stage, along with the pavements and planting around the building. For now the city has the car park without the public space that was meant to sit on top of it.

Jaromír Beránek, the deputy mayor for transport, framed the opening around the interchange rather than the price:

Thanks to a capacity of almost 500 spaces and a direct connection to the metro and buses, we are offering drivers a comfortable and quick way to switch to public transport and carry on into the centre without sitting in queues.

— Jaromír Beránek, deputy mayor of Prague for transport

A hundred of the spaces can be rented at a reduced rate by local residents. Martin Sedeke, the mayor of Prague 11, said more than 50 had taken that up so far. Filip Hájek, the director of TSK, said the 50-crown daily rate means residents can also use the building overnight, when the spaces stand empty — the same arrangement as at the city's other park-and-ride sites.

Four years of procurement, and the number that will be quoted against it

The selection of a builder started in the summer of 2022. A consortium of BAK, Metrostav DIZ and Geosan won, and the job was meant to take eighteen months. Parties from the Spolu coalition began criticising the council's choice straight after that autumn's election, and the competition office then cancelled the award. Prague re-advertised the contract in 2024, and in March 2025 councillors declared the same consortium the winner.

The opposition's comparison at the time was České Budějovice, where the Stromovka garage by the Na Dlouhé louce sports hall has the same capacity and was built for 175 million crowns — 354,000 crowns a space, less than a quarter of the Opatov figure. Zdopravy.cz notes the difference in kind as well as cost: the south Bohemian building is standard concrete, while Opatov is architecturally atypical. That is the honest defence available for the gap, and it is not a complete one. A rooftop park is part of what the premium is for, and the rooftop park is the part that is not finished.

The programme it belongs to

Opatov is one building in a run of them. The magistrate recently started work on a P+R garage near the Zličín metro station, at the junction of Na Radosti and Míšovická: roughly 600 cars including an outdoor area, eighteen months of construction, 619 million crowns excluding VAT. Another is planned at Depo Hostivař on metro A, with 647 spaces, for which a tender has gone out with an estimated value of 601 million crowns excluding VAT.

Two are already open. Černý Most, finished in 2021, holds 886 cars and cost roughly half a billion; Nové Butovice on metro B opened in 2024 with about 400 spaces. Set against those, Opatov's per-space cost is the outlier in a programme the city is still expanding — and the next two buildings are priced closer to Zličín's and Hostivař's figures than to this one.